IV
January, 2095
Lincolnton, Georgia
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I remember the day I first met her, the day she invaded my life.
There was an iron gate that bordered our property, its entrance at the crossroads where the road met the winding driveway that led to the house. My mother had the gate built after she found out she was pregnant. She also paid the contractors to add another foot of concrete to the seawall. She even had them put in a smaller picket fence around the house itself, a moat that split us from the greenhouses and the rest of the property. My father said it was overkill; babies aren’t made of glass. But my mother, who had once given up hope of ever having a child of her own, insisted. My father said some nights she used to stay up till sunrise, imagining all the ways that fate and the devil conspired to take her only child.
The two arms of the gate were decorated with twisting, curling bars that, when the gate closed and the two arms met, formed a metal outline of a pineapple. Near the entrance stood an old-fashioned mailbox, an antique from the days of government mail. A decorative wooden plaque atop the mailbox read: “Karina and Simon Chestnut.”
Once, when my father was in his clouded place, he forgot to hit the clicker as the car approached the gate, and accidentally drove right into it. There wasn’t much damage—he never drove very fast—and none of us were hurt, but my mother asked him not to take the car out again after that. Most days he was fine, and in regular conversation you’d never be able to guess the damage that had been done to him. But my mother said you just couldn’t tell when the clouds would come over him and he’d retract from the world. Even a pristine mind can fog over, let alone one hurt that way. You just couldn’t tell.
There was a buzzer in the grand room downstairs that went off whenever the gate opened. My mother, sick of the sharp sound it made, had recently ordered it altered to emit a prettier ring, two soft chimes followed by a faint rustling, like the sound of leaves in a breeze. On the night the stranger arrived, I heard the chimes; I climbed out of bed and ran downstairs.
My father was standing on the front steps. At the foot of our home, the driveway ended in a circle around my mother’s rose garden. The roses were a pale pink. It was said by many a visitor that no such flower grew anywhere else in the South; the magic that encircled the Chestnuts’ place sustained them.
I stood near my father and watched the car approach. It was the middle of winter. I was six years old. I still remember.
“You should be in bed,” my father said. “You’ll give your mother trouble tomorrow if you don’t get your sleep.”
But I pleaded, and he was too distracted by the looming car and our new guest to argue. I hid behind his leg and peered out, fascinated by the arrival of this stranger about whom my parents had argued for weeks.
The car pulled up to the house. The asphalt was newly laid and the wheels crunched against it. When my mother came out of the car she looked exhausted.
I’d seen her this way before—the previous winter, when Zenith came through and devastated the greenhouses. The house, made of fine red brick, withstood the storm, but throughout the property there were shards of glass, solar panels twisted and cracked. For five days straight she worked with the laborers to repair the damage. I remember seeing that drained look on her face. It was in those moments when I think she secretly wished my father was well enough to help her, that his mind was healed enough not just to carry on pleasant conversation, but to hold important things in memory, to keep from wandering to his clouded place. Sometimes, when I refused to go to bed or played in the parts of the yard that were off-limits, my mother would yell at me. It felt then like she was yelling twice at the same time, once for whatever I’d done and again because she was mad that it was always her who had to do the yelling.
The passenger door opened and from the car unfurled a huge, hunched body. The enormity of it blocked out the light from the driveway lamp and for a moment all I saw of her was a limbed wall of blackness.
“Welcome home, Sarat,” my mother said.
The stranger moved slowly out of the light. My father descended the porch steps. He looked confused, his eyes squinting as though he were trying to focus on a very faraway thing.
“For God’s sake, Simon,” said my mother. “Don’t you remember your own sister? Come here and give her a hug.”
My father stepped forward and hugged her; she tightened up at the feel of his arms around her, and did not reciprocate. When he pulled away from her my father had tears in his eyes but the stranger looked at him in a way I’d never seen before. There was a kind of vicious longing in her eyes, a recollection of something once tender, now poisoned. She looked at him as though he were a plaster mask of her own face, cast before the onset of some great deformity.
I ran in for a closer look at our visitor. I hid behind my mother’s skirt.
“Benjamin, this is Sarat,” she said, pulling me out from behind her. “This is your aunt.”
I stared at the towering woman, dumbstruck. I had seen a picture of her once. In the picture she must have been a teenager, lean and bald-headed, a menacing smile on her face. But what stood in our driveway bore almost no resemblance to that image. This woman was fat, her gut pressed against her dirty gray shirt. But it was more than that. All of her seemed oversized—her limbs trunklike, her nose flattened and wide.
She looked old; I’d been told she was my father’s younger sister—she was not even thirty years old—but she looked older than him; older than my mother, even. As a child I imagined there were only three ages anyone could be—young like me, old like my parents, or very old like my grandparents in the North or the women in black dresses who came to see my father. But this woman was none of these things.
My mother ushered me toward our guest. I waited for her to lift me—to hug me and pinch my cheeks the way all our visitors did. Rarely did anyone come by the house without a present for me. The very old women in the black dresses—who called me the miracle of the miracle—would often take me aside and give me crisp hundred-dollar bills. But this visitor did nothing. Not knowing how to respond, I hugged her leg.
She stood motionless. I felt my mother lift me up.
“It’s past his bedtime,” she said. “I’m gonna take him upstairs. Come in, Sarat, come in.”
Our guest looked at the house as though it were made of thorns.
“Whose is this?” she asked.
“It’s ours, Sarat,” said my mother. “It’s yours. We tore the old one down a few years ago when things got better, after…” She paused. “Come on in.”
But she was looking elsewhere, to the eastern edge of the property, where the seawall curled south past three greenhouses and the broken old shed.
“Why’s that wall there?” she asked.
“The levee? We put that in around ’91,” my mother said. “Used to be the river would flood and wreck the greenhouses three, four times a year.”
“The river don’t run that way,” our guest said. “That’s land for another ten miles. I used to walk out there.”
“Sarat, the river moves,” said my mother. “It ate all that land a long time ago.”
I thought I caught a twinge flash across her face, but quickly it was gone.
She seemed to dismiss our home entirely. Everyone always said there was no finer piece of property in all of northern Georgia than the Chestnuts’ place. But she barely noticed it at all.
“We got a room for you all ready,” said my father. “It’s a nice room.” He looked to my mother, who nodded.
“That’s right, a nice room,” my mother said. “I think you’ll like it, Sarat. It has a view of the river, just like your old room did.”
Our guest seemed to retract slightly at the mention of the river, as though some primal mechanism of defense deep within her had been triggered. I had no idea then of what water had done to her.
She pointed at the old shed. “I’ll stay in there,” she said.
“Sarat,” my mother pleaded, “there’s nothing in there but old glass panels and leftover wood. Come inside.”
“I’ll be fine in there.”
I saw my mother look at my father, who seemed not to find our visitor’s request at all unreasonable. I wondered if he even heard what she said, or if he had drifted to his clouded place.
“All right, Sarat,” my mother said, “wherever you’re most comfortable. We’ll bring the spare bed out from the basement, and some sheets.”
“No,” she said. “It’s fine as it is.” And then she was walking past the rosebush to the shed I’d only ever seen the gardener use to store his mower.
I watched her move. She shuffled on stiff knees, the soles of the feet barely lifting. She reminded me of my pet turtle, every step a pained, deliberate undertaking. I wanted to stay up all night and see whether she would really sleep in that leaning, weathered shed, but my mother ordered me back to bed.
My bedroom faced the rose garden and the driveway. The eastern side of the house obstructed my view of the shed. My bedroom window, which my mother always kept locked, made faint the humming of the solar panels and the sound of the river.
But I lay awake in the dark, listening. Not long after our guest disappeared into the shed, there came from the place a loud cracking noise, like the structure itself was coming undone.
Eventually I heard my parents whisper-arguing about it. I couldn’t make out any of the words, but I could always tell when they argued—it was something in the sharpness of the sounds, but only the ones from my mother’s mouth. I’d never known my father to be anything but tranquil, his keel perfectly even no matter the situation. The way other grown-ups treated him—alternating between overt gestures of sympathy and barely suppressed impatience—made it seem as though he was not supposed to be this way, that there was a fault, a failing deep within the workings of him. But in my eyes he was simply kind.
I heard my mother go down the stairs. I heard the front door open and close.
MANY YEARS LATER, when her letter led me to the place of her buried memories and I read the pages she left behind, I learned all about the moments that filled in the blanks between those things I’d witnessed with my own eyes. And by the time I was done reading, I’d learned every last secret my aunt had to give. Some people are born sentenced to terrible inheritance, diseases that lay dormant in the blood from birth. My sentence was to know, to understand.
MY MOTHER WENT to the shed. Inside she found our visitor tearing the floorboards from the ground.
“What are you doing, Sarat?”
“I want to sleep on the soil,” she said. “Go back inside, Karina.”
“All right, that’s fine,” my mother said. “You want some help? I think we have a crowbar or something in one of the greenhouses.”
“I’m fine—go back inside.”
My mother ran her finger along the underside of the upturned planks resting against the wall. The wood was filthy and bleached a faint green from years pressed against the soil.
“You remember back when you first hired me to take care of the old house?” my mother said. “You sat me down and you went through this long list you’d written of all the things I couldn’t do: ‘Don’t go near the shed, don’t go near the cellar, don’t open the boxes those boys on the boats deliver, don’t wake Miss Dana when she’s sleep…’ ”
My mother paused. “Anyway, I remember when you were finally done, I didn’t know if there was anything left for me to do. Only thing you never said not to do was take care of that brother of yours. Guess I’ve been doing that ever since.”
Our guest looked up from where she knelt on the floor. “How much of him is left?”
“You don’t have to say it that way, Sarat.”
“How much of him is left?”
“He has plenty of good days,” my mother said. “He has plenty of really good days, when you wouldn’t even know it. Sometimes he gets lost in himself a little, sometimes he has trouble remembering new things, a few times he’ll forget old things. But he’s not…he’s good.”
Our guest stared at my mother, unflinching. Then she returned to ripping the boards from the floor.
WHEN I WOKE the next morning she was still in her shed. I sat on the steps of the kitchen door and waited for her to come out, half-convinced the image of her in my head from the night before was the doing of some strange dream. Inside, my mother and father sat at the counter.
“It’s coming up on noon,” my mother said.
“Just let her sleep, Karina,” my father replied. “It’s her first night out of that place in seven years.”
“It’s not sleep I’m worried about. How do you know she hasn’t”—my mother caught sight of me on the steps—“how do you know she hasn’t done something?”
My father stood and kissed my mother on the forehead. I knew she hated when he did that during their arguments, as though it were some kind of counterpoint to whatever she had to say.
“It’s going to take a long time,” he said.
“Fine,” my mother replied. “But I’m not cooking a second breakfast. She wakes up now, she wakes up at midnight, she gets this.”
A plate sat on the kitchen counter, piled with fried eggs fresh from the coop my mother kept near the rows of our numbered greenhouses, as well as asparagus from House Six and strips of real Virginia bacon.
“Fair enough,” my father said. “I’m not asking you to wait on her. Just treat her as if she was your family.”
“That’s not fair.” I could see my mother getting angry. She had a habit of digging her thumbnails into the skin of her middle fingers when her patience stretched. “I married you, didn’t I? She is my family.”
My father recoiled a little, surprised that my mother had taken offense. He was least clouded at the start of the day, least likely to forget or repeat himself, but most often he suffered from an inability to predict how the things he said sounded to ears other than his own.
“I’ll take it to her,” I said, stepping into the kitchen.
My parents looked at me, and then each other.
“Sure, why not?” said my father. “She’s your aunt—go ahead.”
Triumphant, I took the plate. The kitchen counter was a buttercream marble veined with black, and I had just that year grown tall enough to reach it. On my way out I took an oatmeal cookie from the jar on the table and set it on the plate. It seemed incomprehensible to me that so little food could possibly satisfy a body so big.
At the shed I found the doors slightly ajar. I wedged my hips between them and budged them open. Inside, the old prewar bulb was still on—I could feel the heat of it—even though sunlight seeped in through a thousand cracks in the wood. The air smelled of dust and mothballs and the wetness of recently disturbed earth. It also smelled of her.
She was still sleeping, her frame curled into something like a question mark upon a space in the floor where there was no floor—as though the very foundations of the shed had backed away from her quietly in the night. She was snoring and the thumb of her right hand twitched.
As slow and quiet as possible, I set the plate on the workbench. An old black toolbox had been taken down from the shelves—a dust outline still visible in the place where it had sat unused for years. Its contents were strewn about: a screwdriver, a set of pliers, and a folding knife. The knife had a black aluminum handle engraved with initials I couldn’t decipher. There were a few strands of hair on the blade.
I was transfixed by the knife. At home, my mother would not let me near anything with a blade, not even the butter knives whose edges were dull as soap. But something about the confines of the old musty shed made me believe that this was a wild, sovereign place, where my mother’s rule had no power. I was so mesmerized by the rust-streaked blade on the workbench, I didn’t notice when the snoring stopped.
I heard something like a sharp inhale. I dropped the knife and turned to find her on her feet—moving faster than I ever thought possible for someone of such size. Lunging.
But it was not toward me. Like a frenzied prey she darted away to the furthest corner from where I stood. She backed into the walls with such force that the shed itself shook, and I thought the whole rotting thing would come down on us.
Fear of her pulled me toward the door, but something kept me where I stood. I saw the rise and fall of her chest. She looked at me as though I had stingers for limbs.
“Breakfast!” I blurted out. “I brought you breakfast. Look, look!”
I pointed at the plate on the workbench, but she never took her eyes off me.
Slowly, she approached. When she was close to me she knelt down. She leaned in until her face was close to mine and I could feel the milky breath of the newly woken on my cheek.
“I forgot your name,” she said.
“Benjamin,” I replied. “My name’s Benjamin Chestnut.”
She took my chin in her hand and inspected my face. “You look like your father did, when he was young,” she said. “You got none of your mother in you.”
I saw that she had shaved her head, and that there were fresh cuts on her scalp.
“Why do you want to sleep here?” I asked. “It smells funny. We have lots of nice rooms in the house. My parents say you can stay there as long as you want.”
She let me go. Her eyes were red and her face stained on one side with soil. She wore the same clothes she had on when she arrived. It occurred to me then that not a single piece of clothing in our home would fit her.
“Listen very carefully to what I’m about to tell you,” she said. I nodded.
“Don’t ever come in here again.”
SHE DIDN’T LEAVE the shed until dinnertime. In those days, whenever the weather wasn’t too hot, my mother liked to have dinner in the backyard by the levee. We had a beautiful table on the deck, made of real Cascadia redwood. And although the levee blocked our view of the river, we were able to enjoy its breeze.
My mother saw her in the yard. “Come have some dinner, Sarat,” she said. “It’s a gorgeous night—don’t get too many of those anymore.”
She looked at the old plot where my mother once planted her first seeds, back when she was still the help, still an interloper.
“Look familiar, don’t it?” my mother said. “It’s from before, from the old house. You remember how you used to get me that good foreign soil? That’s all we use now, in all the greenhouses. That very same soil.”
IN THE WEEKS that followed, we settled into routine. Our guest spent most of her days and nights in the shed. Sometimes she came outside and walked among the greenhouses, but only late in the evening, when my parents were asleep. I lay awake some nights looking for her out my window.
Whenever I brought her meals to the shed and set them on the ground outside, I peeked in through the doors. I always saw her hunched over a table made of a plywood sheet on stacked paint-can legs. The shed was littered with cheap paper diaries you could only still get from the last dead-tree store in Lincolnton. She was writing in the old way.
My mother said if she didn’t want to be part of this family, it was best to just ignore her. But I couldn’t. Whenever the old widows came by with toys for me, I made sure to play with them out in the backyard from a spot where I could see through the ajar shed doors. But nothing enticed her to notice me.
She seemed to exist in her own wild space, unshackled from the rules and decorum of life as my parents had made me know it. It amazed me to think that she slept on soil and ate where she stood and had been on a trip to some secret place for seven whole years. My sheltered world shook with the realization that it was possible to live this way. I’d been raised in the shadow of walls; she was of the river.
We had fewer guests in the months after she arrived. The politicians who visited from Lincolnton and Atlanta stopped coming. But the old widows still came by every week like clockwork. Some of them wanted to see her, but she would never come to the house.
Sometimes, playing in the paths between the greenhouses, I’d hear the laborers gossiping about her in their strange far-south drawl. They called her a Bluenose and a Pocketmouth and I had no idea what those things meant. But the words sounded exotic, faraway, primed with the stuff of adventure.
LATE THAT WINTER a new visitor came. Through my bedroom window I saw his small motorcade—three busted sedans, the old kind that ran on illegal fuel—at the far gate of the driveway. When I came downstairs I heard my mother say we shouldn’t let a man like that anywhere near our home, that we should tell him to turn right around and go back wherever he came from, but my father said that would make us bad hosts.
The cars came up the driveway to the house. The sound of their old gurgling engines drew our guest out of her shed. From the cars emerged a somber-faced entourage of young men and women, all of whom orbited their boss, Adam Bragg Jr.
With the war coming to an end and reunion finally in sight, this was all that was left of the United Rebels.
“Simon Chestnut, you living saint,” Bragg said. “The only man in the whole of the goddamn Red who deserves his good fortune.”
“Hello,” my father said, uncertain.
“What, don’t you remember me? Remember you came down to see my father that time, got you a nice piece of change from the Martyrs’ Fund?”
“What do you want, Adam?” my mother said.
But the man ignored her when he saw the big broad shape approaching from the woodshed.
“My God, Sarat,” he said. “It does the soul good to see you free.”
“I got nothing to say to you,” she told him. “Go on, leave.”
“I don’t begrudge you that,” Bragg replied. “Hell, I don’t begrudge you anything, with what you’ve been through. All I ask is a few minutes of your time. Is there somewhere we can go and speak?”
“Say what you have to say.”
Bragg looked at my parents. “Can we speak in private?”
“Go on inside,” my aunt told my parents. “They’ll be gone in a minute.”
My father took me into the house, where my mother stood by the window of the grand room, watching.
Bragg took in the property. It was noon and the sunlight turned the greenhouses radiant. A few laborers toiled on the far edge of our farm; otherwise it was quiet.
“You know you’re eating the same lettuce and potatoes the governor’s eating?” Bragg said. “Your brother’s done real well, Sarat. You should be proud.”
“What do you want.”
“Did they tell you how the great Chestnut Estate came to be, by the way?” Bragg asked. “You’ll get a kick out of this. Turns out all those people who thought your brother was watched over by God, well they wanted God to watch over their money too. So they took it out of the banks and started keeping it here. And then the night the Blues came for you, everybody assumed they’d turn the house inside out and take all the money. But when they didn’t, when they just took you and left, that’s when people really started buying the notion that God watched over the Chestnuts’ place. Pretty soon your sister-in-law over there was running a bank damn near as big as First Southern. And that’s not even counting all those people who just sent money, donated it, didn’t want a single thing in return.”
He laughed. “You know, you should march right into that big old house and ask them for your cut,” he said. “God knows you’ve earned it.”
“I asked you what you want.”
“I wanted, first and foremost, to see you,” Bragg said. “When they told me you were getting out, I didn’t believe it. I guess the war really must be ending, if they’re clearing out Sugarloaf.”
He pointed to the young men and women standing near the cars. “See that right there? What you’re looking at is all that remains of the great Southern rebellion,” he said. “All those ones who used to fight on the Tennessee line and in East Texas since the war first started have traded their swords for stump speeches—spending their time in Atlanta now, running election campaigns and talking about ‘peace with dignity.’ ”
“You bitter they don’t hold a table for you in Augusta no more?”
“Ha! Augusta the way you knew it don’t even exist. Ships come up through the Northern ports now, and the Blues decide what we get to keep. Just one more concession the proud patriots of the Free Southern State agreed to in exchange for peace—the Great Reunification, they call it. Sold their country out for a seat at the kids’ table in Columbus.”
“The girl you came here to recruit is gone,” Sarat said. “Go, and don’t come back here again.”
“Honey, you and I both know you’re too broken to recruit,” said Bragg. “I saw you hobble over here from that shed, and we all heard what they did to people in Sugarloaf. Three of the girls they set free with you are already dead, and no Northerner had to come down and kill them, they did the job themselves. Hell, even if I wanted to recruit you, half the rebels still left are dead sure you ratted out the cause in exchange for freedom.”
He waved over one of the boys standing by the car. “No, Sarat, I didn’t come to recruit you. I came to give you a gift.”
The boy brought over a photograph. He was strange-looking, his skin too white and his hair buzzed close to the scalp. The rest of Bragg’s entourage made an effort not to stare at Sarat, but this one looked at her dead on, shards of malice in his eyes.
“You don’t remember him, do you?” said Bragg. She tried to recall why the boy looked familiar, but could not.
“This here is Trough,” said Bragg, “the last living member of the Salt Lake Boys. Every single one of his brothers is dead or worse than dead. He keeps trying to join them, but I think they’re watching over him from the next life, keeping him here with me against his will. Ain’t that right?”
Trough said nothing.
Bragg showed the photograph to Sarat. She saw it and froze. She took it from him and held it close until even her feeble eyes had no doubt who the man was that stared back at her. Even blindfolded and bloodied, his face was more familiar to her than her own. It was the face of the thick-necked guard from Sugarloaf. Bud Baker, the man who’d drowned her.
“How did you find him?” she said.
“Damn idiot tried to take his wife and kids on a road trip to Zion and wandered into Mexican Protectorate territory,” said Bragg. “When the Mexicans found out who he was, they shopped him around. I figured you two must have overlapped in that place, and that maybe you’d be interested in saying hello.”
Her eyes never left the photograph. “Where is he?”
“We got him in a safe place down south,” said Bragg. “You can tell us what to do with him, or you can come down and do it yourself.”
OVER MY PARENTS’ OBJECTIONS, she left with Bragg. They drove five hours southwest to a cabin hidden among the stripped and bleached trees near Lake Seminole. The cabin stood at the edge of an algae-covered watering hole. A thin dirt trail led to its door. In the distance to the south, the Georgia coast gave way to the savage Florida Sea.
She found four people tied and blindfolded inside the cabin—Bud the guard, a woman who must have been his wife, and their two teenage children. All four were shackled to their chairs, their eyes covered with strips of black cloth. All their faces bore the blood and bruises of recent abuse, but none more so than the man she had come to see.
Bragg and his entourage waited outside; she entered alone. The blindfolded woman, at the sound of the door opening, broke into whimpered pleading, but Sarat ignored her.
She knelt near Bud. Up close, she could see the outer rings of deep black bruises around his blindfolded eyes. He was drenched in sweat, his heartbeat shook him.
She put her hands on his knees. He jerked back as though touched with a live wire.
“Just let my family go,” he said. It was a different voice than the one she remembered—slightly thinner, free of resolve. “Just let them go, they did nothing wrong.”
Gently she lifted the blindfold from his eyes. For a moment he looked at her as though trying not to recognize her face, as if by burying the memory of her he could bury the reality of her too. He closed his one working eye and when he opened it again and saw that she was still there, he straightened in his chair and tried to steel himself against what he knew was coming.
From her pocket Sarat retrieved her rusted folding knife. She cupped Bud’s chin in her hand and stroked his cheek.
“Sweetheart, sweetheart,” she said. “I’m going to make you sing.”
SOON THE SURROUNDING WORLD evaporated and with it the screaming that filled the room. Only her wrath remained, her unquenchable want. She wanted the blood inside him. He looked different now than when she’d last seen him: the early shadows of a beard growing on his face, his hair longer. But the blood inside him was the same.
She took it all. Rising, she looked at the hollowed remains of the guard and she felt the inverse of fulfillment—the empty undoing of a castaway who, rabid with thirst, resorts to drinking from the ocean.
When what revenge there was to be had was had, she turned and made to slit the throats of her other captives. She went first to the children. They looked about sixteen or seventeen: redheads, both with curly hair and the same jaws as their father. The shorter of the two had soiled himself and was shaking and sobbing. The other sat still, looking forward at his captor though he could not see.
When she closed in to kill them, she saw for the first time the mirrored contours of their faces.
“You’re twins,” she said.
The shorter boy said nothing. The taller one nodded.
They must have wondered why she did not kill them—why, with the knife so close to their throats, she stood and knocked the table over and screamed and left them there.
Outside, Bragg and his group waited. When they saw the color of her hands and the color of her clothes, some of them looked away and others smiled.
“We’ll burn it down with them in it,” said Bragg. “Nobody will ever know.”
“No,” she said. “The boys and their mother are still alive. Let them go.”
“Let them go where?”
“I don’t care. Smuggle them past the western line out into Blue country. Send them home.”
“Sarat, they might have seen things. They might have recognized voices, they could tell…”
“Send them home,” she said.
ON THE LONG DRIVE BACK she saw Atlanta in the distance. It had grown during her years in Sugarloaf.
“I heard Albert Gaines killed himself a few years back,” she said. “Where’s he buried?”
“Oh, he ain’t dead, or at least he’s still breathing,” said Bragg. “After the Blues let him go he went off to that shack of his in the forest, doesn’t speak to nobody or go nowhere, just rotting away with none but his guilt for company. Let the maggots bury him when the time comes, goddamn Pocketmouth rat.”
“So it’s true that he’s the one who told them?”
“He’s one of the ones. Soon as they started rounding people up, suddenly all these proud Southern patriots started squealing. He didn’t just give you up, he must have told them a hundred names. Truth is, I’d have killed him myself if my father hadn’t made me promise not to. But that promise is binding on me—it sure as hell ain’t binding on you.”
They traveled slowly on the highways that circled the Southern capital, theirs the only old fossil car on the road. She saw now that all the other vehicles around them were distant descendants of the old Tik-Toks, powered entirely by the sun. She remembered the old wartime footage of hollering Southerners on the back of huge fossil trucks, revving their engines in defiance. All that was gone now, and looking at the roads you’d think there never lived a single Southerner who’d ever wanted anything to do with the old fuel that started the war. Drivers in nearby cars looked at the sluggish fossil sedan in which she rode, some with curiosity at the sight of the ancient thing, others with disgust. But none tried to stop them, none said a word.
She remembered something Albert Gaines once told her all those years ago in Patience. He said when a Southerner tells you what they’re fighting for, you can agree or disagree, but you can’t ever call it a lie. Right or wrong, he said, a man from our country always says exactly what he means, and stands by what he says.
Even that, it turned out, was a lie.
SHE CAME HOME just before dawn, sneaking in over the eastern seawall. I cracked my bedroom window open and very quietly I leaned out to watch her. By the side of the shed she stripped naked and washed her clothes and herself with water from the garden hose.
Hers is the first naked body I remember. I looked on, mesmerized by the strange scars and disfigurements I assumed were the property of all adult skin.
Excerpted from: REASONABLY SATISFACTORY AND ENCOURAGING TO ALL: AN ORAL HISTORY OF THE REUNIFICATION TALKS
DAVID CASTRO (Peace Office Senior Negotiator, 2089–2095): I remember the day their delegation came up from Atlanta. We spent six months preparing for it, so that by the time negotiations started, we had thousands of pages of notes on every conceivable topic. Border controls, restitution, prisoner swapping, you name it. Before we came to the table, we knew exactly how far the President was willing to go, how much he was willing to concede. We thought we’d covered all our bases.
Then the first day of negotiations came around. I remember we were meeting in a large boardroom in the basement of the Peace Office. There were five of us on the Union side, a small delegation because we had no real authority. Everything had to be approved later on in the Executive Building. But when the South’s negotiating team showed up, there must have been two dozen of them. Each one had a different title, Director of Revolutionary This, Secretary of Patriotic That. One guy gave me his card; it said he was a Constitutional Defense Officer.
We thought they’d want to start with travel restrictions, or amnesty for all those rebels we had sitting in the detention camps. Or maybe they were desperate and would want to talk money. They’d held out for so long with their stubborn reliance on fossil fuels while the rest of the world moved on, their cities were falling apart, and we thought we could get them to make all kinds of concessions in exchange for infrastructure money.
We had a little agenda ready for them with a few proposed starting points to kick off the negotiations. But I still remember, the very first day, their chef de mission sits at the table, pushes the agenda aside without reading it, and says to us, “First thing’s first: I don’t want to hear a single one of you ever use the word Surrender.”
It turned out they didn’t give a damn about travel restrictions or prisoner swaps or any of those things. For three days straight all they wanted to do was haggle over the wording of the Reunification Day speeches and the preamble of the peace agreement. Every day they’d come up with something new they wanted included in the public record—one time it’d be some nonsense about courage in the face of aggression, the next time it’d be about the necessity of self-defense and the protection of long-cherished ways of living. Hell, I remember we spent a couple of hours one day planning out how the Reunification Day photo op would go. They wanted their President to be the one to extend his hand first, and ours then to take it. The next day, they changed their mind; now they wanted our President to reach out first
Of course, the other negotiators on the Union team loved all this, because they were getting their way on all the strategic stuff. And the people in the Executive Building were happy to go along with it because they were looking further down the line, to a time when they’d have to campaign for all those Southerners’ votes. I was the only one who put up a fight. I told the President’s people if we go along with this, if we nod and smile while they parade some fantasy about this being a noble disagreement between equals, and not a bloody fight over their stubborn commitment to a ruinous fuel, the war will never really be over.
But in the end, Columbus went along with it. And even today, all these years later, we live with the consequences. They didn’t understand, they just didn’t understand. You fight the war with guns, you fight the peace with stories.