CHAPTER ELEVEN
Sarat walked through the ruins of Lake Sinclair. She stayed close to the remains of Milledgeville Road. It was wrecked in places with craters ten feet deep, and in others with fallen trees and power lines and charred fencing.
As she neared the lake, Sarat veered from the main road to the smaller paths that led past an old bank branch and a dry jut in the lake bed. Here the fallen trees were densest, interspersed with the boathouses and the crumbling docks. Occasionally, rodents rustled through the undergrowth, but otherwise it was quiet. Sarat walked slowly to the site of the meeting.
The firebombing of Lake Sinclair happened early in the war, before it was known that the Blues had lost control of their airborne assassins. At dawn there came a buzzing sound, like a fly trapped in an upturned glass. All over the South, people had gotten used to the sight of the Birds, but no one had ever seen a flock before. They circled, a dozen or more with their wings outstretched, their shadows like fading bruises on the water.
Nobody in the South knew why the Birds had chosen to obliterate this place. Some said one of the Union pilots must have entered the coordinates wrong. Or perhaps the generals and politicians who decided which places to burn and which lives to end had been given faulty intelligence.
Nobody could settle on an explanation. But it was better to believe something, anything, than to accept that it had happened without reason—that the wandering Birds had simply congregated over this particular place on this particular hour and rained hellfire in accordance with no greater order than that of blind chance.
In the years since the firebombing, the lake had gone dry. But a strong storm had come through the week prior to Sarat’s visit, and on this day the bed was still swollen with rainwater. A film of green algae covered the surface. Thick as carpet, the algae held the water so still that the entire lake bed appeared as emerald-tinted land, sturdy enough to walk on.
Everywhere around the edge of the lake, the waterside houses lay in ruins, the small roads warped, the trees ashen and still. When she reached the lake bed, Sarat walked down a short driveway that led to a small and badly damaged church: a home converted into a place of worship. An ebony cross held firm to the front door.
The house had been cleaved down the middle in the bombing. The ground under the lake-facing half of the home neared collapse. The back rooms—two bedrooms and a study—teetered precariously over the lake bed. The front half stood level on the land.
Sarat climbed through a gap in the side of the house where there had once been a windowsill. The house was dark but for the midday light that dropped through the broken ceiling like a curtain. Inside, the house smelled of old paper. Fine particulate floated in the sunlit shaft.
In the middle of every month she came here to meet Joe. But this was their first meeting since she’d shot the general at Halfway Branch five months earlier. In the time between, the Blue incursions into Southern territory had increased in frequency and severity. So much so that Joe had temporarily suspended their arrangement.
She saw him inside the house, sitting where he always sat, on a wooden kitchen chair just beyond the curtain of sunlight. She recognized him by his outline: thin-framed, his posture neat, his hands clasped and resting on the table.
“Good morning, Sarat,” he said. “It’s good to see you again.”
“Mornin’, ” Sarat replied.
“Come in, sit. It’s a beautiful day, no?”
She still liked the sound of his voice, his strange accent. He had a habit of pronouncing Ps as Bs, soft Hs as hard ones. Sometimes when he talked about his home he spoke words in his own language that relied on alien letters, letters made of sighs and careful curls of the tongue.
Sarat sat at the kitchen table. She felt the warmth of flooding sunlight on the back of her neck. Behind Joe, the floor began to slope sharply downward, and through the rear windows she could see the dull green surface of the near-empty lake.
“Finally, I have a chance to congratulate you in person,” said Joe.
“It was nothing,” Sarat replied.
“It was certainly not nothing. The single most significant Southern victory since the beginning of the war. And you did it, Sarat. It is your victory.”
“It’s no victory, it’s one man dead. They got plenty more still living.”
Joe shook his head. “Albert was right about you,” he said.
“Have you seen him?” asked Sarat. “I’ve been trying to reach him for months, but he up and vanished.”
“I haven’t heard from him either,” said Joe.
“You think they picked him up? He’s been known to them a long time.”
“I don’t think so. Maybe if this were thirty, forty years ago, but he’s an old man now, like me, and they don’t care too much about old men. He was like this as a soldier too—he would disappear for days across the border into Ar-Rutbah without telling anyone. That was back when it was not a very good idea to travel carelessly in Iraq. He even brought me with him a few times to translate and drive. At first I thought he was doing something very dangerous, meeting with the enemy, committing treason. But he just wanted to see the land, to meet the people. I believe they eventually tried him for it—he spent a year in military prison. Did he ever tell you that?”
“He told me you saved his life a couple times,” said Sarat.
“I did no such thing. I was just an assistant, what you would call a fixer. The Americans liked having locals around who could speak English and Arabic, who knew the people and the area. It is always better if you can have people from the same country do the work.”
The sound of a twig breaking outside derailed their small talk. Sarat turned to look out the sliver of space where the front wall was cracked open. She watched and waited for footsteps, but none came. She turned back to Joe, who sat undisturbed, his green dress shirt washed white by the sunlight.
“If it had been the Blues, we wouldn’t have had time to worry about it,” he said. “Anyway, let’s get to business. What do you need?”
“Lag’m,” said Sarat, using Joe’s word for the weapon. “Like the kind you brought last year.”
Joe nodded. “All right. Big or small?”
“Both. Same as last time. There’s a convoy coming down near Tennga next week. Got a colonel riding with them. I know the roads they’re taking, I’ll lay the mines down there.”
“Same as last time, understood. Anything else? More rounds for Templestowe? Cash?”
“Just the mines,” said Sarat.
“Consider it done.”
“There’s something else.”
“Of course.”
“I heard there were secret peace talks happening, that the Free Southerners had some of their people up in Columbus a few months ago. There any truth to that?”
“I believe that is correct,” said Joe.
“That still happening?”
“From what my people tell me, the director of the War Office has suspended the talks.”
Sarat smiled.
“I told you,” said Joe. “It is your victory.”
WHEN SARAT RETURNED HOME from Lake Sinclair there was a stranger’s car parked in the driveway, an old fossil-powered sedan. Standing beside it was Attic, the eldest of the Salt Lake Boys.
“Christ,” said Sarat. “I thought they killed you at Fayetteville.”
“Mr. Bragg wants to speak to you,” Attic said. He was as tall as Sarat but thinner, emaciated to the point of appearing sickly. He had dead, distant eyes like his brothers.
“Which one,” said Sarat, “the boy or his father?”
“Mr. Bragg Senior,” said Attic. “He wants to see you and your sister.”
“He doesn’t need to see my sister. Let’s go get it over with.”
“He said he wants to see you and your sister…”
“You deaf or just stupid?” said Sarat, approaching the boy. There was a mechanical quality to him, a sense of removal. “You and I can go, or you can go back to Atlanta alone. Your call.”
They drove west toward the Southern capital. The car had an old radio; Sarat turned the dial. Between bursts of static came dispatches from amateur broadcasters scattered nearby: disembodied Bible reciters; howling cultists preaching apocalypse from the confines of their cabins; madmen squalling into the void. She settled finally on an old man reading a list of names. In the background there played a patriotic Southern hymn Sarat remembered from her childhood. The old man spoke in monotone, barely pausing for breath, and it was impossible to discern whether he was reading the names of martyrs or traitors or simply inventing the names as he went along.
“So what happened to you up in Fayetteville, anyway?” asked Sarat.
“I was captured,” said Attic.
“The Blues got you? And they let you go? Goddamn, you must have spilled your guts and then some. Old man Bragg must love you if he’s keeping the rebels from stringing you up with your pockets in your mouth.”
“I didn’t say a word, and I wasn’t captured by Blues,” said Attic. “I was captured by terrorists.”
It took Sarat a moment to realize he meant the other Southern rebels, the ones who had refused to come under Bragg’s umbrella group. She let out a high cackle.
“You let your own people get you? Holy God! That’s more embarrassing than the Blues just shooting you dead.”
“They’re not my people,” said Attic. “They’re terrorists. Mr. Bragg is my people. I’m free because of him.”
“Terrorists, goddamn,” said Sarat. “That word will work on anybody, won’t it?”
But Attic wasn’t listening. “I didn’t say a word,” he repeated. “I didn’t say a word.”
At the lip of the horizon, veiled with grime, the capital of the South appeared.
A WALL OF TOWERING SLUMS pierced the sky, afloat in haze. The buildings marked the outer edges of Atlanta, a city impossible with size and growing, forever inching outward, metastatic with life.
Once, long ago, its landscape had been inverted. Skyscrapers dominated the downtown core, and beyond them stood the hospitals and the arenas and the sprawling university campuses. Further out, the skyscrapers gave way to the suburbs, lined with strip malls and parks and golf courses and a ring of highways.
Now the tallest buildings belonged to the slums that walled the outer reaches of the city, towers brown and dull as rotting teeth. Within them lived the refuse of the Southern State—refugees from the border towns and from places ravaged at random by the Birds; the poor of the southernmost coast who fled the storms and the scorching heat; soldiers and rebels and people who were born here and whose parents and grandparents were born here, people who knew no other home.
Near the ever-growing slums stood the electronics sweatshops and the shirt factories and the vertical farms. These were huge structures, wider than they were tall. The sweatshops and the factories were made of red brick and the farms were encased in thick glass. The glass was impenetrable to the eye, lacquered from the inside with condensation. Only the reek of manure escaped the walls and clung to the outskirts of the city like a coat of paint. Every dawn and dusk a bleak procession marched from the slums to the sprawling workhouses, and from the workhouses to the slums.
Closer to the heart of the city, the bureaucracy of the Free Southern State—a set of gray, identical buildings—acted as a moat around the innermost core. In the center was the Southern State Capitol; the residences of President Kershaw and of the senior secretaries; as well as the gaudy, gated mansions of the South’s neo-grandees, who owned the sweatshops and the factories and the farms.
Attic drove slowly through the slums. The air smelled of smog and the exhaust of a thousand humming generators. A small group of children ran aside the old fossil car, knowing through instinct that the driver of such a thing must reside above the masses in the hierarchy of the Red. They tapped on the windows and asked for change. An old man limped from one car to the next, selling tissue boxes for five dollars apiece. Lone Star flags hung limp from the balconies overhead as the car inched through the alleys of Little Houston.
It took two hours to get from Sarat’s home in Lincolnton to Atlanta, and another two to get from the outskirts of the city to the core. At the edge of the United Rebels’ compound, the car stopped at a wire-fenced gate manned by a couple of boys in old jungle fatigues. The guards eyed Attic’s passenger with vague disdain. They opened the gate and waved the car through.
It was a simple compound, made up of three squat buildings huddled under a highway overpass. The buildings bore no signage, and at the steps of each sat a few men and boys in plastic chairs, rifles by their sides.
Two of these men ushered Sarat and Attic to the second floor of the middle building. There they sat in a large room that resembled a living area. They waited for half an hour before Bragg Sr. arrived. He was wheeled in by his son and joined by three assistants. Even as Atlanta sweltered, the old man wore a buttoned shirt and a sweater vest, and yet didn’t break a sweat, as though his pores had hardened and dried with time.
His son wheeled him close to Attic and Sarat, and then took a seat in a corner of the room.
Bragg Sr. waved his hand in Attic’s direction, and quickly the boy stood up and left. Then he looked Sarat over from head to toe, a vague, strained look on his face, as though he were reading a book written in a language other than his own.
Finally, he turned to his son. “You’re right,” he said. “Maybe she isn’t really.” His son said nothing.
He turned back to his guest. “So you’re the girl who caused all that mess,” he said. “What’s your name again?”
“Sarat Chestnut.”
“Sarat Chestnut,” Bragg Sr. repeated. “You from the Montgomery Chestnuts? Good people, those. Had a boy named Paul, fought and died in Beaumont early on in the war.”
“No,” said Sarat.
“Her people are from Louisiana,” said Bragg Jr., “down by the Mississippi Sea near Old Orleans.”
“Christ Almighty, she ain’t even from the Red!” said the old man. “The child of swamp people, out on the front firing a gun. Is that what we’ve come to?”
He inched closer to Sarat. “You know, when Albert first told me about you, I thought he was playing games. That’s what he’s always been like, trying to rile everyone up with new things, recruiting more girls than boys. Every few weeks, another pet project.”
Sarat winced. She had always known there were others; every time news came of some homicide bomber sneaking into the Blue country and turning one of their city squares to rubble, she always wondered if it wasn’t Gaines who’d eased the farmer’s suit onto the martyr’s frame. But in another compartment of her mind she secretly harbored the notion that perhaps she was the only one—that, having found her, he had no reason to recruit anyone else to the cause. She knew it wasn’t true—of course it wasn’t true—but that was no hindrance to believing it.
“Ah, but still, I got a soft spot for that Gaines,” the elder Bragg continued. “He’s worked hard for the cause. Used to fight for the Northerners once, back when that Bouazizi was just a bunch of tribes tearing each other apart. But that was before all this, and I don’t hold it against him…”
Sarat felt Bragg’s ashtray breath on her face. It amazed her, the length at which old men could talk. She wondered if it wasn’t the sound of his own voice, rather than the words themselves, that pleased him. He had small dull eyes and the only time they lit up was when he was speaking.
Suddenly he stopped. He turned to one of his assistants. “Get us some water, Noah,” he said. “And get the boys to move the fans in from the office. It’s hotter than hell in here.”
The assistant left the room and soon a couple of young men entered with electric fans in hand. They set them up on opposite ends of the room, such that their crosswinds met where Sarat and the old man sat.
“And where’s that sister of yours, anyway?” asked Bragg Sr. “I told them I wanted to see both of you.”
“She’s not a part of this,” said Sarat.
“Darling, we’re all a part of this.”
The assistant returned with two glasses on a tray. The old man drank as though it were his first time seeing water.
“It’s that goddamn Gaines,” he said, wiping his mouth. “He does this to all his little kids, makes them think it’s all about them—that the whole damn war turns on how they feel, what they lost, how they’re hurting. But it doesn’t. There’s a whole great world out there, little girl…”
“Don’t call me little girl,” said Sarat.
“A whole great world, more than can fit in the eye of your Templestowe.”
He smiled when Sarat’s brows furrowed at the mention of her rifle’s name. “That’s right, we know secrets here too. But we’re your friends, and a lot of them out there ain’t.”
He pointed toward a half-open window, through which a sliver of downtown Atlanta sizzled in the heat and grime. “Just down the street, there’s FSS men who’d hand you over to the Blues tomorrow if they thought it’d buy them a little more favor with Columbus, or give them better odds of pushing forward that white flag they call a peace plan. There’s cowards, there’s rats, and now you’re food for all of them.”
“And you gonna save me, is that right?” Sarat said. “You and those little boys of yours? That kid Attic who got took by some of his own? The other one, couldn’t even get his farmer’s suit to blow before the Blues killed him? Look at this place—you’re living in a goddamn cave under the highway, talking talk while those FSS cowards sell out the whole of the Red. Hell, you should be asking me for help, not the other way round.”
Bragg Sr. laughed, his black gums showing. He turned to his aides. “She’s dumb the way we used to be dumb,” he said. “It don’t ever change, don’t ever change.”
Facing Sarat again, he said, “Darling, don’t you understand? You’re here because I like you. There’s not one of my men as man as you, none that managed to do what you did—a general! The biggest goddamn get since President Daniel Ki!—that’s why you’re here. I would like to keep you around, keep you from falling into their hands. Because, believe me, now that they got the son of the man you killed running the Southern offensive, he’ll burn down whole cities trying to find out who did it. And if he finds out it was you, he’ll string you up.”
“So let him,” Sarat said. “I’m not afraid to die.”
“That’s because you’re young and you think dying’s quick,” Bragg Sr. said. “But they got ways to make dying take just as long as living.”
“So what do you want me to do, then? Crawl in a hole and wait?”
“Yeah, that’s pretty well it. Go on back to that nice little charity house you have by the river and stay there. Don’t go anywhere near Halfway, don’t go whoring around with that barkeeper’s daughter in Augusta.” He paused and smiled. “Yeah, we know about that too—and make sure your sister stays there with you, your brother, the whole damn family. Wait till the fire dies out from Junior’s blood up there in Columbus, and then I promise we’ll help you put a bullet in his head too, if that’s what you want.”
“You done?” Sarat said.
“Yeah, darling,” the old man replied. “I’m done.”
Sarat stood. “Thanks for the advice,” she said, and left.
THE RESIDUE of the conversation lingered with her as Attic drove her home. She felt emboldened by having stood up to the man whose whims turned the currents of the Southern rebellion. She shifted in the passenger seat of the old sedan, leaned her head out the window. Even the saline Atlanta smog felt like a mountain breeze.
“Let’s stop in the Floordeelee for a drink,” she said. “I know they don’t pay you shit; I’ll buy.”
“I have to take you home,” Attic said.
“What, they hire you by the hour or something? It’s just a drink—won’t take much time.”
Attic shook his head. “They don’t like me over there,” he mumbled. “Not my place.”
For a moment she thought he was talking about Bragg and his men, then she realized he meant something else altogether.
“Christ, are you serious?” she said. “So you got no fear about picking up a gun and going to the Tennessee line, but you’re too scared to go into your own people’s neighborhood because they got different skin?”
Her words seemed to shame him into acquiescence; soon they drove into the New Fourth Ward. It was a cramped mass of towers on the east side of the city, adjacent to the grounds of a sprawling electronics factory from which a steady high-pitched din emanated at all hours.
The housing complexes, high and gray, were barely an arm’s length apart—such that, between them, the buildings formed a narrow labyrinth of alleys. The cramped streets were lined with shirt vendors and stalls full of produce smuggled from the vertical farms, as well as money-movers and Tik-Tok mechanics and Just-A-RedBuck Stores.
They parked on the outskirts of the neighborhood and walked in, traversing the narrow inlets of asphalt between the buildings. Power lines ran down from the solar panels that covered all the roofs and from one building to another, creating a latticework overhead. Some of the old men and women sitting in the street watched Sarat and Attic as they passed, but it was the tall, bald girl that caught their interest, not the thin Utah boy who walked with his head lowered behind her.
The Floordeelee was a brick shack. It stood at the end of a narrow peninsula penned in on three sides by residential towers. Outside, there was an open space littered with old card tables and folding chairs. At all hours of the day and night the tables were full or nearly full.
Sarat and Attic bought a couple of drinks and sat at one of the tables. She drank a Kingway and he nursed a Coke.
“So you’re indebted to the old man for life now, huh?” said Sarat. “Since he pulled some strings and got you out of that mess you were in?”
“I was indebted to him before then,” said Attic. “He saved me and my brothers in Utah. Without him we’d all be dead.”
“So what ever happened to ya’ll in Utah anyway? You just hide out in that farm the whole time? I heard they found one of your brothers in a pile of pig shit or something.”
Attic said nothing. She tried to get him to talk about his life before the Red, but he wouldn’t. In time she did manage to shame him into having a couple of beers. Soon his shoulders seemed to loosen. As dusk rolled over the city, both he and Sarat were pleasantly drunk.
“See, the problem with men like Bragg is they think it’s their right to run the place,” said Sarat, slurring the words but adamant in her conviction. “They never known what it’s like not to run the place, think they can just tell you what to do and you gotta listen like you got no say, like you got no thoughts, like you ain’t even alive.”
Attic seemed to look past her, at a group of small children running barefoot through the alley, playing tag.
“See, it’s like what Albert Gaines told me once—you ever met Gaines?”
“No,” said Attic.
“You should. He’s got this whole war figured out—he ain’t like them other old idiots. He told me once, he said, Listen, because I’m about to tell you the gist of every opinion that’s ever been had.”
Sarat leaned forward, as though imparting a great secret. “All these old men want it to be like it was when they were young. But it’ll never be like that again, and they’ll never be young again, no matter what they do. And it’s not just ours that do it. It’s theirs too. Imagine if the North had just let us be. Imagine if they didn’t fight us tooth and nail, kill all those innocent people, just to keep us from having a country of our own and doing things our own way—would it really have been so bad? No, of course it wouldn’t. But it wasn’t that way when all those old people that run everything were young, so they can’t let it be. But you and I”—she pointed at the children playing on the street behind her—“and them too: we’re young, and we ain’t bound by what they bound by. We’re gonna pull the power from their hands, because when it comes down to it, they don’t really care ’bout the Red. Only thing they ever cared ’bout was themselves. But us, we’re of this place. We…”
“I’m not of this place,” said Attic.
“But you care about it. About the Southern cause.”
“I don’t.”
Sarat sat back in her chair, surprised by the nothingness in his voice. “Then why were you fighting for it, then?” she asked. “Why’d you pick up a gun and risk being torn to shreds by the Blues if you don’t care for the cause?”
“I wanted to be something,” said Attic. He looked past Sarat to where the smiling children played. “I just wanted to be something.”
IT WAS NIGHTTIME when they finally got back to her home. He was new to drunkenness and after a half-hour of swerving badly along the highways, she made him pull over and she took the wheel.
The old fossil car was not nearly as nimble as the sun-powered Tik-Toks, but it carried within it a beast of a motor. Every now and then Sarat pushed her foot against the pedal just to hear the ancient thing roar.
When she got home she found Karina and Simon in the backyard. Simon sat on a kitchen chair facing the river, wearing a silver bowl for a hat. Carefully, Karina sheared the hairs protruding from beneath the bowl. She’d hung paper lanterns between the trees. Their candlelight spilled through cutouts in the shape of snowflakes. Simon was laughing, squirming in his seat as Karina brushed the fresh skin on the back of his neck with the cold handles of her scissors.
“Where’s my sister?” said Sarat, startling them both. The smile disappeared from Karina’s face and in its place came something more neutral.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Left with her friend the reef pilot this afternoon. Gone to Augusta, I guess.”
Sarat waved the maid inside. “Go fix him some dinner.”
“All right,” said Karina. “Soon as I finish cutting his hair.”
“No. Do it now.”
Karina set her scissors down. Sarat could see a trickle of venom in the way the maid looked at her, and she met it with the same. As Karina left, Simon looked back at her. “Don’t worry, baby boy,” she said. “I’ll be back in a minute.”
When there was nothing else left to look at, Simon turned to his sister. He seemed ridiculous to her, sitting in the yard with a silver bowl on his head like a little boy playing spaceman.
“She’s trying to make you like a child,” said Sarat, tossing the bowl aside. “She’s treating you like a little baby. But you like it, don’t you?”
Simon said nothing. She turned his head to face the river and started cutting his hair. She tried to undo the bowl cut, but Karina had already done too much damage, and she had no choice but to finish it.
“She’s not family, you know,” she whispered into her brother’s ear. “She might treat you nice, but she’s not family. She’s a stranger, and you know full well what strangers can do.”
As she leaned in to talk to her brother she breathed in the new smell of him, the smell he’d taken on since Patience. It was to her a sour, nauseating scent—the smell of curdling milk. She tried to remember what he smelled like before, back in the camp.
She recalled sometimes he’d come home drunk from one of his rebel excursions and she’d catch the Joyful on him, but that was a temporary thing, a costume for his breath. Had there ever been another? Did he ever smell the way she smelled, the way Dana smelled? She couldn’t remember, and in her struggle to recall what her brother had been like before he was stripped of himself, she discovered she was angry at him. She was angry at him for not dying in Patience. Had he simply done what all the other men on the execution line had done, she would have forever known him as a martyr, not a marionette—a dumbstruck plaything for doting housekeepers and idiot widows. What was left now was a hollow stencil of the brother she once knew, his very existence polluting her memories of him, burying and displacing the fine, brave boy that was. He should have died.
Caught up in these thoughts, she failed to notice that Simon was crying. He made no sound, looked straight ahead, but she could see the tears in the lanterns’ weak snowflake light.
“What is it,” she said, “your own sister not good enough for you? You trust a stranger more? You happier with some woman you know nothing about?” As she spoke she could hear her voice rising, and she knew it would carry inside the house, but she did not care. “She ain’t even from the Red. Her mother and father, they live up there in the North, with the Blues. The same Blues that did this to you, that killed our father and our mother, the Blues that kill and humiliate our people every single day. And you like her better? You like her better than your own blood?”
It was only when her brother, weeping openly now, recoiled with his hands against his face that she realized she had instinctively brought her own hand up to strike him.
Sarat threw the scissors in the dirt. She went inside, past where Karina stood in the kitchen. She went to her sister’s room and shut the door behind her. She lay in her sister’s empty bed, beneath the soft sheets that glared a pinkish silver under the light. The sheets smelled of beautiful things—of citrus and jasmine cream. But they also smelled of Dana, of her hair and of her skin and of her breath. The smell Sarat knew from childhood, the smell of Chestnuts.
JUST BEFORE DAWN, she woke to the sound of a knock on the door. For a second she thought it was Dana, but instead she saw Karina.
“What are you still doing here?” said Sarat. “You’re spending the night here now?” She chuckled bitterly. “You sleeping with him too?”
“Sarat, there’s a man outside,” said Karina. “It’s about your sister.”
Before the slick of sleep had gone from her eyes, Sarat was running out the door. She found another of Bragg’s boys in the driveway. He had his head lowered as though he’d done something wrong.
“Speak,” said Sarat. “What happened to her?”
“The Birds,” mumbled the boy.
THEY DROVE most of the way to Augusta. Just before they reached the hospital, she saw the wreckage by the side of the road.
A group of locals from the nearby town had gathered around the twisted remains of the vehicles, gawking at the carnage. The remains were of three cars and a bus. The bus was charred although the shape of its body held, but the Tik-Toks had been cracked open like fortune cookies, and no longer resembled cars at all. A crater severed the road.
They drove to the nearest hospital. It was more of a clinic, no bigger than a diner, and had once been an animal hospital before the war. Relatives of the dead and injured crowded the entrance and the lobby. Alongside them were members of the United Rebels, who had been dispatched from Atlanta to document the carnage. Sarat shoved past them all, yelling her sister’s name, until Adam Bragg Jr. took her by the arm and led her to a room near the back of the clinic.
They passed a silent spectacle of the dead and dying. The bus had been carrying migrant Southern workers returning from the Blue border of South Carolina. They’d been hired as part of an agreement engineered quietly between Atlanta and Columbus to send workers to help fix cracks in the Northern quarantine wall. It was dangerous work for little pay, and no Union laborer would do it.
The men and women lay covered in stained white sheets, their relatives gathered around them. The nurses and doctors, greatly outnumbered, moved from patient to patient with grim resignation.
She found the room where her sister lay. Before she entered, she heard Bragg Jr. as he tried to tell her something—“It was just dumb luck,” he said. “They haven’t had control over those things in years.” But his voice sounded very far away.
She closed the door behind her, and the sounds of the pained and wailing were muted.
The girl on the bed ended at the knees. The sheet on which she lay and the one that partially covered her were colored a red that, in places, had darkened to black. The clothing had been sheared off her, and the skin below was blistered and burned.
Sarat stood over her sister. She ran her hand along the skin of Dana’s thigh. She felt the indentation in the skin where someone must have tried to stem the hemorrhaging wound. She saw the coal marking on her sister’s forehead—“3:49,” the time the tourniquet was tied.
She saw the chest rise and fall for the last time. She saw the eyes flicker, the lips move.
“It’s going to be all right,” said Sarat, but it was not Sarat making the words. They left her mouth but they belonged to an impostor. “It’s going to be all right. Just stay with me, it’s going to be all right.” The room smelled of rubbing alcohol.
Sarat dropped to her knees and rested her head on her sister’s chest. Dana’s fingers curled around hers.
“Beautiful girl,” Dana said. “I miss you already.”
FOR THE NEXT WEEK Sarat did not set foot inside her house, except to lock Dana’s bedroom door and prohibit Karina from ever coming anywhere near it.
She slept outside, sometimes in the woodshed but other times on the damp soil by the river, near the plot where Karina’s crops struggled to grow. At night she dreamed of drowning.
A month after she set her sister’s ashes free in the Savannah, the Blues finally came for Sarat. One night she heard music among the trees; a whisper of hands against bark, of feet against earth, very faintly in the distance. The night was quiet but enveloped in the quiet was a murmur. Years later, she would recall a pinprick of red light moving across the woodshed wall. Then the door creaked open. A canister tumbled into the woodshed, and the room erupted in sound and light.
Excerpted from: THE CIVIL WAR ARCHIVE PROJECT—SUGARLOAF DETAINEE LETTERS (CLEARED/UNCLASSIFIED)
Dear **** *****,
I received your letter in February. ****** from the ************* ******** humanitarian team delivered it to me. As usual, ******* ***** read it first, so I don’t know if I got the whole thing. But I am grateful to ******, who has tried *** best to help me, and of course to you for writing.
I’m still in Camp Saturday. There are ** of us here, I think, but it’s hard to tell. We are still in isolation, and the ******* ******** ***** ********* us every ***** *****.
Since ***. ***** took over, things have gotten worse. He ******* ** ****, I think, but I’ve never seen his face. I think it was him who ordered them to take our books, our sleeping shades, our toothpaste packets, and everything else that reminded us we’re still human beings. I know he had to give his permission for them to ********* us after we started our protest.
It happens at all hours. Day, night, there’s no difference here. First they’ll come in and tell you to quit being difficult, to just eat.
When you refuse, they take you to another room. There ************************ **. ***************************. *************** *******. **************************. ************.
*************. ********************. ******************. *********. ************. ************************. **********************************************.
******************. ******. ***************************. **************************** ***********************. *************************************. ****************.
*************************. **************************. ******************************. *******************. *****************. *********. *************************** **************************************. ************. ******************************.
I heard ***. ***** believes one of us killed his father. But I’ve been here for years, long before any of that. I never even saw ****** *****, never heard of him before one of the *** ****** told us what happened.
Everything else is the same. The days go by. *********************, except for ****** ********, when we get to see the sun.
I know they’ve stopped telling people how many of us are still being ********. ************* ****************************************. They’ve been trying everything they can think of to make us quit. There’s a nurse here, and *** does everything in *** power to make *** ************ ******** ** ******* as possible. I don’t know why. I told *** it’s a violation of *** oath, but *** doesn’t care. I begged the guard, but he cares even less.
I heard there’s talk of peace back home. I hope for your benefit that it’s true, but I don’t think it matters much for us. We’ve been here too long. Whatever we were before this is all gone. People here speak to themselves. They see ghosts. I dream about you and *****, and about ******, and about home. I hope to hear from you soon.
Yours with love,
*****