CHAPTER FOURTEEN
In the spring of ’95 I broke my arm. It was a small break and the bone healed quickly, but it’s the first I remember of pain.
It happened in May, at the tail end of what had been a bad few months. The stress of our new living arrangement—my aunt barricaded behind the doors of our woodshed—was starting to gnaw even at my father’s tranquility. Many nights I lay flat against the cooling vent in my bedroom and listened to him and my mother argue downstairs.
“She hasn’t said a word to us in four months,” I heard my mother say. “Not even good morning, like we don’t even deserve that.”
“It takes time,” my father replied. “She needs time.”
“Stop saying that. What she needs is a doctor, a therapist, somebody they train to deal with people who’ve been through what she’s been through. She needs help we can’t give her.”
“The man from the Red Crescent said she needs to learn how to be free,” my father said.
“Does she look like she’s learning?”
When they’d exhausted themselves arguing, they decided to drive down to Lincolnton for dinner. My mother didn’t want to leave me in the house alone but she thought I was asleep and decided to chance it for a couple of hours. When I heard her coming up the stairs to check on me, I jumped up and ran back into bed and closed my eyes.
I waited until the taillights faded beyond the iron gate. I got out of bed and turned on the lights.
I left my room. I walked down the hall and down the stairs, past a row of hopelessly faded photographs on the wall. The photographs were of my grandparents, and the woman my parents told me was my other aunt.
One of the photographs depicted my grandfather, the man after whom I’d been named. It was washed out; only the faint outline of a man was visible, his face a cloud. He cradled something in each arm, but these things too were indecipherable. For a long time I thought it was a picture taken after his death, a picture of his ghost. I started to believe that there existed another class of age, older even than the oldest of the living—a class whose citizens lost the ability to speak even to themselves, and were confined to perfect, impenetrable stillness.
I walked downstairs, intent on solving a mystery that had tugged on my mind for months. A mystery hidden within one of our greenhouses.
I went outside. In the garden the air was warm and wet on the skin. The lights that hung on the side of the house lit up as they sensed my movement, and then went dark after I walked away.
I walked south to where our greenhouses stood in rows. The greenhouses were made of a translucent glass. Inside each pane were fine copper veins, part of the circuitry that pulled energy from the sun. At the time, translucent panels were still new and largely unavailable south of the Tennessee line; it took my mother many months of wrangling and many called favors before she managed to move them across the border. In the day they hummed and glittered, at night they were silent. And at all times, even while they worked, it was possible to look through them and see the things growing inside the greenhouses.
Near the southeast edge of the property, House Thirty-six stood unused. Instead of glass, it had plywood boards for skin. After Hurricane Zenith came through and damaged many of the greenhouses, my mother once again tried to have new panels brought in from the North. But she was only able to secure enough for eleven of the twelve damaged greenhouses. House Thirty-six was boarded up.
At night, I sometimes saw our visitor come here. Whenever she did, she carried one or two of her old paper diaries with her. But when she emerged from the greenhouse, the books were gone.
I arrived at House Thirty-six to find its door boarded shut and held with a small padlock. But along the roof there was a square of missing plywood, through which I thought I could peer inside.
The roof was too high for me to reach. I saw a ladder leaning against the side of House Thirty-five, where my mother grew fuzz-skinned okra and eggplants big as limbs. With a full-body heave, I managed to tip the ladder off the side of the greenhouse. For a moment it stood weightless in the air, and then fell back onto the side of House Thirty-six with a loud crack. I looked back toward the house and the woodshed to see if she heard, but there were no signs of movement.
I climbed the ladder. With every step it leaned slightly this way and that. But I had seen the laborers use it many times, and they were much bigger than me; I kept climbing.
When I reached the top rung I felt exhilarated. Beyond the boarded roof, the whole of our land lay visible. Not only our land, but the land surrounding it: the place where the river curved, where trees with braided hair grew straight out of the water. I looked to the south and saw the lights of distant towns.
But inside the greenhouse, I saw almost nothing. Under the silver cast of the moon, there was only the faint outlines of footsteps in the barren soil. I craned to see beyond the square of dirt lit by the moon, but there were no signs of whatever it was she came here to do.
As I readied to give up, a burst of red light caught my eye. It came from far to the north, from a place beyond the river. I turned to search for it but in an instant it was gone.
I stood perfectly still on the ladder, observing the boundary of our property. Past the levee, the river emitted a soft hushing sound as it moved. But there was something else, a break in the darkness on the far bank. It was almost impossible to see, but there was a demarcating line along the horizon—below it, the blackness was uniform and unnatural; above it was the imperfect darkness of sky, streaked with clouds and spotted with stars.
I stared at the line in the horizon, trying to make sense of it. Suddenly, the same red flash of light shone directly at me, sharp and blinding.
As I fell, I thought I saw the outline of a guard tower.
Then came the sky. I watched it as the ladder tilted. In the darkness I reached out with my left hand to break my fall.
A spear of fire unlike anything I’d ever felt before ran up my arm. I lay in the dirt and screamed. I looked away from my arm and toward the gate at the end of the driveway. I yelled for my mother, even though I knew she wouldn’t hear. I was alone.
Then I heard footsteps coming from the direction of the woodshed. For a moment I didn’t believe it was her, but when I saw that towering frame looming above me, I knew.
I was still crying in pain. I asked her to help me, but I had no idea what I wanted her to do. I only wanted the fire in my arm to end. She knelt down beside me.
“You broke your arm,” she said.
The words terrified me. I had no idea then that broken things can be repaired. Whenever something broke on the farm—a vase or a lightbulb or a greenhouse panel—my parents did not repair it; they tossed it away and bought a new one.
“Look at it,” she said.
I refused.
“Look at it.”
I turned to look at the place from where the fire came. When I saw the unnatural way in which my right arm was bent, I passed out.
WHEN I CAME TO, I was in my own bed. She was sitting beside me.
“Take this,” she said, handing me a couple of white pills. “It’ll make the pain stop.”
I swallowed the pills and within a few minutes I felt a strange, body-wide bliss, a warmth radiating outward from my stomach to the end of every limb.
“Still hurts?” she asked.
I shook my head. The world around me was hazy and unfocused, but the fire in my arm was gone.
“What were you doing out there?”
“I was trying to look inside the greenhouse,” I said.
“Why?”
“I saw you going there sometimes, and I wanted to find out what you were doing.”
I knew she’d be angry at me, but I thought she’d be angrier if I lied. And I was certain she’d be able to tell if I lied.
But she didn’t look angry, and she didn’t say anything in response. Instead I thought I saw a passing flicker of admiration in the way she observed me. And then it was gone.
“You fell off that ladder?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
She chuckled. “You really are your father’s son.”
I turned to my ruined arm. I saw it had been straightened against the spine of a wooden plank. The plank and the limb were tied together with strips of torn cloth.
It seemed such a crude prosthetic. I began to wonder if I’d ever be able to use my arm again. In all the times my parents had taken me to swim and play basketball with the other kids in Lincolnton, I had never seen a boy with a wooden limb.
“Have you ever broken a bone before?” she asked me. I bristled at the silliness of the question—obviously I hadn’t; there were no other wooden planks tied around me.
“No,” I said. I tried to lift my arm, but it was as though the lines from the brain to the limb had been severed.
“I can’t move it,” I said.
“In time,” she replied. “The board’s there so the bone sets right. It doesn’t matter how a bone breaks, it matters how it sets.”
“I’m sorry I looked at your things, ma’am,” I said.
She shook her head. “Don’t call me that,” she said. “My name’s Sarat.”
“I’m sorry, Sarat.”
“Why’d you do it?” she asked me.
“I just wanted to know.”
“Don’t ever apologize for that,” she said. “That’s all there is to life, is wanting to know.”
We heard the sound of the doorbell chimes; the front gate opened. I knew my mother and father had returned, and although I dreaded their reaction once they learned what I’d done, I was unconcerned. The strange bliss that enveloped me remained.
My mother came upstairs and when she saw me her eyes turned wide as wells.
“What did you do?” she said, over and over. For a moment she ignored her sister-in-law’s presence entirely, and I thought she was asking me. Then some accusatory deduction must have revealed itself to her mind, and she turned around.
“What did you do to him?” she said.
“He fell and broke his arm,” Sarat replied. “I splinted it and gave him some Bonesetters. He’ll be all right.”
“You didn’t call an ambulance? You didn’t call a doctor? You didn’t call us?”
My mother was moving toward her now. “What the hell is wrong with you?” she said. “A boy breaks his arm and you do nothing?”
Sarat grew silent. From the way my mother was standing before her I wondered if my mother would try to strike her. But instead she slammed the window shut and locked it.
“For God’s sake, don’t you understand? The war is over,” my mother screamed. “This isn’t Patience, this isn’t the front, this isn’t the prison they locked you in. You want to keep living in that world, go crawl back into that filthy little shed of yours and live it there. Don’t you dare try to pull us into it, you hear me? Don’t you dare.”
I watched Sarat walk away. On the way out she passed my father, who’d been drawn upstairs by the sound of my mother’s voice. She walked past him as though he didn’t exist. It seemed impossible then to imagine the two of them as siblings, as having come from any kind of overlapping past.
When he saw my arm, my father came to my bedside.
“Oh no,” he said.
“That’s all you’ve got to say?” my mother asked him. “She breaks your son’s arm and that’s all you’ve got to say?”
“She didn’t break it,” I protested.
“She’s damaged, Simon,” my mother said. “She’s a danger to us, a danger to your son. I don’t know what it’s going to take for you to see that.”
This time, they didn’t bother to argue in hushed tones. I watched them fight right there in my room. My father was upset and struggled to find the words he wanted to say, and this time my mother did not have patience. But I was not upset. At the time I had no idea it was just a chemical mirage, the Bonesetters coursing through my blood. Even later, when the warmth turned sour in my stomach and I threw up all over the floor, I still felt good.
In the clinic in Lincolnton, the doctor said the break looked worse than it was. He laughed when my parents brought me in, my arm still braced with the wooden plank. He asked if they’d found me in some old bunker on the Tennessee line, fighting the Blues.
He put a proper cast on and said in a month it’d be good as new. I was coming off the Bonesetters then, and embers were starting to glow again inside my arm, but I still remember the overwhelming sense of relief I felt when I heard those words: Good as new.
By the time we drove back to the house, it was almost dawn. My mother, who’d spent the whole car ride to the clinic digging her thumbnails into the skin of her middle fingers, had cooled enough to begin interrogating me about how I came to break my arm. But I held under the pressure. For some reason, the prospect of my parents entering House Thirty-six and discovering whatever it was that lived there was the outcome I most dreaded. When they finally laid me back in my bed, I fell asleep with a smile on my face.
ONE OF THE THINGS I remember most clearly about my mother is her capacity for stillness. Sometimes, when she was out planting strange new flowers in her backyard plot, or painting childlike pastorals on our riverside levee, she would suddenly become perfectly motionless. Once or twice I caught her doing it—frozen, as though trying to escape the attention of some passing beast. Once, after she went back into the house, I knelt by the levee and tried to mimic her, staring hard into the concrete. But wayward thoughts began to pile up in my mind, and in a minute or two I was ready to burst. I was young and I had no use for stillness.
The morning after I broke my arm, my mother went to see Sarat. The door to the shed was ajar and the light always on. Peering in, my mother could see her hunched on a stool over the worktable, sewing in the old way with a thread and needle.
“If you want me gone I’ll go,” Sarat said, her eyes still on her work, her back to the door.
My mother went inside. Even in the coolness of dawn, the shed was hot with the light of the incandescent bulb.
“This is where they kept us, the night they came for you,” my mother said. “After they took you away and searched the shed, they locked Simon and me in here with rifles at our heads while they turned the house upside down. I never saw Simon like that before, the way he screamed when he saw those guns.”
My mother sat on a stool near the bench on the other side of the shed. She inspected an old squirt can that once held oil and now served as a pen holder. “I always hated this goddamn shed.”
My mother turned her eye to the thing being sewn—a shirt of gray cloth, big and baggy as a potato sack. The stitch lines were wide and ragged, the needle disappearing within the massive hand that held it.
“It’s bad light for that kind of work,” my mother said. “God knows how you can even sleep with that thing on.”
“I forgot how to sleep in the dark,” Sarat said.
My mother grimaced. The shed smelled of meat, a butcher shop stink. An ancient fishing box sat atop the workbench shelves, its tackles rusted and never used.
“I was wrong to yell at you the way I did,” my mother said. “The doctor said it was good, as far as splints go, and Benjamin would have been hollering all night if you hadn’t given him those painkillers.”
“He’s soft.”
“Christ, Sarat, he’s six years old.”
“I didn’t mean it as a bad thing.”
“He told us he fell chasing a wolf away from the greenhouses,” my mother said. “God knows there hasn’t been a wolf around these parts in years. I think it might be the first time he’s ever lied to us.”
Sarat looked up from her sewing. “He’s a good kid,” she said. “He didn’t do nothing.”
“Oh I’m not mad at him,” my mother replied. “He’s lying because he likes you, and he wants to share whatever happened only with you. That’s how little boys are supposed to feel about their aunts. He likes you, Sarat. In spite of everything you do to keep your distance from us, he still likes you.”
“I thought they’d made a mistake when they told me about him,” Sarat said.
“When who told you about him?”
“For a while, when they were still trying to get me to talk, every now and then they’d tell me they’d arrested Simon or Dana or Mama. That’s how little they really knew—they had no idea which of us were dead and which of us were alive. Then one day they came in and said, If you don’t talk we’re gonna have to take Benjamin away. I thought, it’s one thing if they don’t know Mama and my sister are gone, but they don’t even know Benjamin’s been dead twenty years.”
My mother smiled. The first blue of sunrise crawled through the cracks and illuminated the dust in the air.
“Your brother’s a good man,” my mother said. “He’ll compromise on just about anything. But when we found out it was a boy, there was no way he’d have any other name. It’s the only time he’s ever put his foot down for as long as I’ve known him. Can you believe that?”
“Was he still like a child when you married him?” Sarat said.
My mother sighed. “So that’s it, then? That’s the grudge you decided to keep? All right, let’s pretend he was. Let’s say I took advantage of that simple little boy with the bullet in his skull, the boy I was paid to take care of. Let’s say I raped him too, got my child out of him when he was too badly damaged in the head to even know what was happening. Let’s say all of that was true—take it out on me, then. Be cold to me, hit me even, if that’s all you know how to do. But Simon ain’t to blame for it, and that little boy sure as hell ain’t to blame for it.”
Sarat folded the cloth and set it aside on the bench. From beneath the bench she retrieved a glass jug full of Joyful, made from the remains of mangoes and peaches and oranges pilfered from the greenhouses. She unscrewed the cap; a rotting sweetness laced the air.
“You know some of those old war widows still come by, every now and then,” my mother said. “There’s only a few of them still alive, but they still come by to touch Simon’s forehead and do their little hocus-pocus. They still call him the Miracle Boy of Patience, like he never did any other thing his whole life. They still think the miracle is that he survived. But bad people survive too; lucky people survive. The miracle isn’t that he survived, the miracle is that he’s healing.”
She rose from her stool and emptied out a couple of Southern Freedom Bond mugs that held a few nails dislodged from the floorboards. She walked to Sarat and held one out.
“Go on,” she said, “it’s my fruit you’re stealing.”
They drank until the sun was high and the walls bled orange. My mother spotted an old wind-up radio on one of the shelves and cranked it until it spat a hum of static. She searched the bands and found a piece of soft indecipherable jazz. A song crackled through the ancient machine.
“They ever let you listen to music in there?” my mother asked.
“Not like this.”
“I want you to know we tried, Sarat,” my mother said. “We filed petitions, we hired a lawyer. We gave money to the governor and the governor before him until they’d sit down with us. We talked to senators about your case. But none of them would do anything. They were terrified of having their name said in the same sentence as that place. But I swear to God we tried.”
“You shouldn’t have.”
My mother inspected a soft line that ran down Sarat’s left cheek, a scar her silence once earned her in Sugarloaf. It ended at the jawline, near a place on her neck where another line began.
“Christ, I can’t imagine what you went through,” my mother said.
“I never asked you to.”
“But you want me to. I mean, you could have left already. You could have up and gone back to wherever you think the fighting still is, killed yourself a soldier or two. Killed yourself, anyway. But you’re still here. I’ve seen it before, when I was a little girl watching my parents treat the wounded in all those hellholes we lived in. You suffered too much not to let anyone know it. You act like we’re invisible, but you want us to know what they did to you. I think you need us to know.”
Sarat threw the jug of Joyful across the room. It met the wall and turned to shards.
“What do you want me to say? You want me to say they broke me? Fine: They broke me. They broke me. They broke me. Does it make you happy to hear it? You’re right, I can’t bury it. What am I supposed to do, now that it’s done—just snuff it out like a candle? Last night when you thought I’d hurt your boy you were ready to rip my throat out as revenge. But I gotta turn my back on what was done to me, on what’s been done to me every day since I was your boy’s age? Well let me make it clear for you: whatever part of me can do that is dead.”
“And yet the rest of you lives,” my mother said. “And yet you sew shirts from cloth and make booze from fruit and write whatever it is you write in those old books of yours. And yet you run out in the night to splint my little boy’s arm. You’re healing, Sarat. What’s bitter in you might fight it, but you’re healing.”
My mother rose from her seat. “You’re right if you think I don’t find you worth loving,” she said. “God help me, I know you’re family and I know I married into your blood and know I should believe that you’re worth loving, but I don’t. So many terrible things made you this way, but I don’t have to live with what made you, I have to live with what you are. And I know you don’t find me worth loving either.
“But I’ll love you anyway. And your brother will love you anyway. And your nephew will love you anyway. That’s what family does. Take what time you need, Sarat. Heal how you want to heal.”
THE FOLLOWING WEEKEND, we went to the Saturday market in Lincolnton. I didn’t expect her to come with us, but when I went outside I saw her in the car, the passenger seat pushed all the way back.
I remember thinking it was something important, a milestone—families take trips together.
When we arrived the market was in full swing. A throng of shoppers from all over northern Georgia descended on the town every weekend to buy fresh produce—so much so that eventually they started closing off a quarter-mile of Peachtree Street near the old Baptist church and turned the whole thing into a fair of sorts. I liked walking around the market with my parents, watching the sellers run out to greet them. We were rich everywhere in the South but only here were we a special kind of royalty, one of maybe five or six families in the whole state who still did the old small-batch farming, the kind you could hardly do anymore on account of the heat and the storms. I liked to watch the vendors leave their stalls, leave their customers mid-order, and race over to ask what Miss Karina was working on these days, what strange crops she’d managed to revive.
On this day, though, almost none of them came out to see us. I knew right away it was because of Sarat. Some of the sellers had been acquainted with the Chestnuts long enough to know exactly who she was, but most were scared away by the size of her, the way she shuffled, slow as stone.
After a while one of the fruit sellers did come over to say hello. He was one of my parents’ bigger customers, exclusive purchaser of all Chestnut Farms cabbage, which he marketed as having all manner of restorative effects. At the sight of him approaching, my mother turned to my father and whispered, “His name’s Sam.”
The man came and shook my parents’ hands. “Well, if it isn’t my favorite people in all of Georgia,” he said.
“Hello, Sam,” my father said, smiling.
“How are you, Mister Simon? You’re looking good.”
“I’m all right, I’m all right.”
Sam turned to my mother. “So I hear you’ve got something new.”
“When have I ever let you down, Sam?” my mother said. “I’ve always got something new.”
“So let me know! What is it? Tyler from Reunion Farms says you’ve figured out some way to make oranges that aren’t so thirsty. That it?”
The conversation began to bore me. I looked around for one of the kids’ stalls, where clowns built balloon animals and did card tricks while their makeup ran in the blistering heat.
It was only then I noticed Sarat had wandered away from us. She was standing by one of the lab-grown meat stalls, staring intently at something down the street.
I didn’t realize it then, but she couldn’t have known. She couldn’t have possibly known that this was one of the conditions, one of the things the Free Southerners had agreed to as a precursor for peace. She didn’t know that in return the Red got monthly access to a couple of Northern hospitals and the promise of slightly more favorable descriptions of the Southern cause in the Reunification Day speeches.
She wouldn’t have known any of this. Instead, she simply saw a Blue soldier, in full uniform and gear, patrolling the market; patrolling Southern land.
I watched her reach for a butcher’s knife on the stall table. And then she was moving toward the soldier. I’d only ever seen her move that fast once before, the morning she lunged away from me in the shed. The Blue soldier was conversing with a couple of clothes makers at a stall on the far side of the market; he didn’t see her coming.
Somewhere in the depths of me I knew what was going to happen. I started to run, my damaged arm clunky by my side. When I reached her she was a few feet from the soldier’s back. She raised the butcher’s knife high.
I stepped in the space between her and the soldier. I screamed for her to stop.
The sound of my voice startled the soldier. He turned around. I had my back to him but I knew he’d raised his weapon, because Sarat froze where she stood. The knife dropped from her hand.
I began to imagine what would come next. She would be arrested, thrown back in that prison again. This time they’d put her there for good. I only hoped that the soldier behind me wouldn’t shoot her dead right where she stood.
There came a silence. The rage on her face was gone, in its place a kind of disbelief. Behind me, I heard the soldier say her name.
“Sarat?”
And then I heard her say his.
“Marcus.”
ONE OF THE VENDORS had run over to the other end of the street and called the Blue soldier stationed there. He came running, rifle raised.
“On the ground!” he yelled at Sarat. But she did not move, did not look away from the man she had moments ago readied to kill.
“It’s all right,” Marcus said to his partner. “She’s an old friend.”
The other soldier lowered his rifle. He seemed unpersuaded, but Marcus waved him away.
Marcus looked around at all the people who were now staring.
“There a silent auction going on or something?”
A couple of people chuckled, more in relief than anything. As they went back to their stalls, Marcus nodded in the direction of a church nearby. He turned and walked toward it.
Sarat looked at me. “Go back to your parents,” she said.
“Are you going to hurt him?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “I’m not going to hurt him.”
He was standing between the pews when she entered the church, his rifle and helmet removed. She saw then the fullness of his face. It was the same face, the same skin, the same boy. He’d grown a few inches taller in the years since she’d last seen him, but his smallness was the same. And in the way a soldier’s gear is designed to puff out the chest and broaden the shoulders, he looked even more mis-sized, too dense for his height.
He was like a child in the way he looked at her. “I don’t,” he started. “Sarat, I don’t…”
But she did not see him. She saw Chalk Hollow. She saw Cherylene’s pen and the ugly little shower trailer thick with mist and the place high in the trees where you could see forever. She went to him and she held him.
“You’re alive,” he whispered. He kept saying it, and she didn’t know which of them he was trying to convince. “You’re alive, you’re alive.”
They sat together at the pews. The church was plain and musty and resembled the quaint courthouses of old Southern stories. There were seats in the balcony above them but no one sitting in them. They were alone.
“So they took you off the customs ships,” Sarat said.
“Yeah, they do all that stuff up North now. Everything goes through the Blue first before it ends up down here. Cuts down on smuggling.”
“And what about you? You here cutting down on smuggling too?”
Marcus laughed.
“You know, for a while I thought they stationed me down here because they secretly knew I was a Southerner this whole time. But now I think they really put me down here because I’m small. They think it makes all the people down here less hostile if the Union soldiers patrolling the place aren’t the big brawny types you see in the recruitment commercials.”
“Ain’t true, though,” Sarat said. “Hell, I saw you for ten seconds and I wanted to stab you.”
He was smiling and when he smiled she felt as though she could walk to the doors of the church and open them and find a different world waiting.
He lifted his fingers to the place on her neck where one of her thin pink scars began. He traced it down to her shoulder.
“I did this,” he said.
“No you didn’t.”
“You can’t wear this uniform and not know what they did in Sugarloaf, Sarat. I’ve gotten by for a long time looking away, turning my head. And the truth is I never cared much about what either side did to the other because it’s a war and maybe that’s all war is, is shredding the rules. But I can’t do that when it’s you. I did this.”
She took his hand, pulled it away from where it rested on her shoulders. She tried to remember how she’d gotten that particular scar, but in this moment the memory was unreachable.
“You never wronged me,” she said. “You’re the only one still living who never once wronged me.”
IN THE WEEKS that followed, my arm began to strengthen. Soon I was able to move it, although the cast was stiff and grimy. Where the cast ended I could smell the unwashed skin below. It had a rank smell that, for reasons I couldn’t understand, I found strangely addictive.
After two weeks my mother let me play outside, but there were to be no trips to basketball or swimming practice in Lincolnton until the cast came off and the doctor declared the bone fully healed.
One morning I was playing in the backyard. My parents were on the other side of the property, busy haggling with a contractor who’d come to replace our front gate’s busted motor.
There seemed always to be breakages and malfunctions in the small machines that moved our little riverside world—storms came through and wrecked the solar panels; the heat warped the circuitry of our lawn mowers and our generators. It never occurred to me until much later how exhausting it must have been for my parents, constantly warring with the land that housed them.
Sarat was in the kitchen, shucking corn for dinner. Slowly she had begun to make more frequent appearances in the house—sometimes she would sit awhile with us in the living room watching television. A few times she even stayed for dinner. Whenever she did, my parents said very little, trying to pretend like it was no big deal. But every time I could see my father struggling to restrain a giddy little smile. For a while she must have been alien to him, even if he remembered her name and her relation, but I think now he was starting to connect the woman he saw with the girl he knew before. And in doing so I think he was able, in some small way, to connect as well with the boy he used to be.
I watched her through the kitchen window. She worked in a monotone way, her eyes focused nowhere, lost in her own space. But then she looked up, and she saw me, and she came outside. Often she wandered around the property, walking among the greenhouses. But this was the first time I’d seen her come near the levee in the daytime. It was as though she was repelled in some invisible way by the river—not by the sight of it, which was hidden by the seawall, but by the sound of it, the sound of water moving.
“How’s the arm?” she asked.
“It’s fine,” I replied. “In two weeks it’ll be good as new.”
“It’ll be better than that. Bones that set right grow back stronger.”
It was an amazing thing to hear, and whether it was true or not, instantly I believed it.
I stood up. “Do you wanna see something cool?” I asked.
“Sure.”
“Come on, then,” I said. Without thinking I took her hand and led her to a place near the levee protected by the shade of a hanging willow tree. It was there, in a small pen, that I kept my pet.
“This is my turtle,” I said, pointing at the mounded, unmoving animal.
She seemed to forget me for a moment. I watched as she knelt down until her face was almost in the pen, inspecting the yellow, symmetrical markings on the shell.
“He’s real slow,” I said, embarrassed at my pet’s reluctance to even show its head. “Some days he doesn’t even move at all.”
“She’s a girl,” Sarat said.
I asked her how she knew, but she didn’t answer.
Finally she broke from her trance and stood up. I wiped the dirt from the knees of her pants.
“Is it true you were in prison?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“They never told me.”
“How long were you there?”
“Seven years.”
The number was incomprehensible to me; a lifetime.
“What are you gonna do when they get that cast off you?” she asked.
“Play basketball,” I said. For weeks I’d thought about little else. “My team’s in first place, and if we win the rest of our games, we get to go to the championship in Atlanta. They have a water park there, got the biggest swimming pool in the whole country.”
“You like swimming?” she asked.
I nodded. “I go twice a week to the pool in Lincolnton. I’d be there today if I didn’t have the cast.”
“What you doing in a pool in Lincolnton when you got the river right here?”
I laughed. “You can’t swim in the river, silly.”
She looked at me as though I’d come from some other planet, and then that vague confusion turned to pity. She walked past me to the levee, shuffling slowly in that way of hers, the frame hunched and the knees threatening to give.
Where the seawall passed our backyard, my mother had painted a crude mural, the kind they have in kindergartens. It was of stick-figure children playing in the field among the apple trees, a smiling sun watching over them. She had given the children names and sometimes she’d talk to me about them as though they were real. I never understood why.
Sarat stood by the side of the levee. She was tall enough to see past the wall and through the willows. She watched the river. It wasn’t until many years later that I understood the courage she was struggling to summon, the demon she had to bury before she could set foot once more into the moving water.
She turned to me. “C’mon, then,” she said. “Let’s go swimming.”
Instinctively, I turned to see if my parents were around. Going over the levee was the one thing I was forbidden to do above all else. Beyond the wall lay death by drowning and death by disease and all the monsters that populated my mother’s stern warnings. My feet froze to the soil.
“I can’t swim with my cast on,” I said, but it was not the cast that scared me.
“Yeah you can,” she said. “C’mon, I won’t let nothing bad happen to you.”
Slowly she climbed down the other side of the levee, and soon she was walking among the willows to the riverbank. Suddenly the sight of her fading behind the braided leaves filled me with panic. I imagined she might step into the river and never return, taken by that green snake to the end of the world. My feet unfroze, a newfound courage took me, and I chased after her.
From atop the levee I saw her walk into the water. She walked barefoot and fully clothed. I climbed down the wall and ran with my head to the ground, following her footsteps in the soft riverbank soil.
And then I looked up, and the monster was upon me. For the first time in my life, I was at the river. Its sound and size astounded me, the banks wild and wide, the speed of the current readable in the branches and leaves that raced along its surface. I had never seen water move this way.
She stood waist-high in the river, the water curling around her. I remember the way she looked in that moment, that violent euphoria barely sheathed behind the lips. The water curled around her wounded body and as it moved it did not heal her wounds, it cauterized.
She was motionless. I waved at her to come closer to the riverbank, but she seemed not to see me at all. She was breathing hard though she had not run. She looked in that moment like a child, wide-eyed, uncertain. Then it dawned on me: she was afraid.
And then she was gone, fully submerged as though weighted with anvils. When she surfaced, her baggy shirt held fast to her skin and pins of light glimmered on her shaven head.
“Come here,” she said.
I shook my head. “I’m scared.”
“Good,” she said. “Now you have something you can kill. Come here.”
I faced down the river. Everything I had known of the world suddenly felt very far away. I saw that beyond the river there was a high wall, lined with razor wire and manned by guards. And although I wouldn’t be able to articulate what I felt until much later, I knew then that the bulk of the world was just like this: wild, unvaccinated, malicious. I stepped into the river.
It was only a few footsteps before the soft polished floor fell from beneath my feet, and I was taken by the current. I screamed, but her hands were quickly on me. She held me afloat and carried me in further. The sound of water was like a million invisible mouths all whispering at once. The water was alive; I knew it because the water was moving.
I looked at her then, and I saw a thing I’d never seen before. My aunt was laughing.
Excerpted from: THE CIVIL WAR ARCHIVE PROJECT—REUNIFICATION DAY CEREMONY INVITATION LETTER (CLEARED/UNCLASSIFIED)
Governor Timothy Combs
391 West Paces Ferry Road
Atlanta, GA 30305
Dear Governor Combs,
At the direction of President Joseph Weiland Jr., it is my pleasure to formally extend to you an invitation to the National Reunification Summit in Columbus, Ohio, on Friday, July 3, 2095.
As the President has previously stated, the Summit will turn the page on a dark chapter in our great nation’s history. Civic leaders, including yourself, from across the Union will gather in Columbus to declare what has been, since the dawn of this country, self-evident—that we are a nation forever indivisible.
For security and logistical reasons, travel to Columbus from several states, including Georgia, will be restricted in the months preceding and immediately following the Summit. As such, please respond at your earliest convenience with details of your travel party (maximum 4), so as to allow the Peace Office time to perform the necessary security checks and issue the required travel permits.
This is a momentous day for our Union, Governor. A day to celebrate the courage of all Americans who fought so gallantly for what they believed in, but also a day to put years of heartache behind us and begin the difficult but vital work of healing. A day to rejoice and to rebuild. I look forward to meeting with you and all the other delegates from the great state of Georgia at the formal Reunification Ceremony and the grand parade to follow.
Sincerely,
Malcolm Kaysen
Deputy Secretary to the Director of Southern Affairs
Peace Office, Department of Defense
One Columbus Commons
Columbus, OH 43215