CHAPTER FIFTEEN
In late May, Scott came through and devastated Lincolnton. It was a small storm, but powerful, and although it just missed our home, it disrupted our daily routine. With the community center and the elementary school badly damaged, I found myself confined to the farm. I was thrilled with my good fortune—I had more time with Sarat.
One day I found Sarat in the woodshed, hammering boards. The night before, my parents had gone to a party hosted by the fledgling Southern arm of the New Reunificationists, who in those days were among the first to speak of peace as though peace meant victory. My parents decided to spend the night in Atlanta; my aunt and I had the farm to ourselves.
I found her kneeling by the place where once she had removed the floor to expose the earth. She had beside her a fresh stack of fake-cedar planks.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Putting the boards back in,” she said. “You take any more wood from this shed, the whole thing will come down.”
“Can I help?”
“Sure.” She waved me over. I sat between her knees and she put the hammer in my hand. She held the nail in place.
“One soft one to set it, one hard one to drive it,” she said.
I tried, but I couldn’t bring the hammer down hard enough, for fear I’d miss and hit her finger. Finally, I cracked the nail with enough force to move it, but at an angle; it splintered the wood.
“Better, better,” my aunt said. “At least that did something.”
She had me practice on the damaged plank until I perfected the motion. In half an hour, I’d hammered the board into the floor with so many nails, no force in the world could move it. I beamed at my handiwork.
We covered half the hollow in the floor before the midday heat exhausted me. She suggested we go cool down in the river. With ease she picked me up and set me on her shoulders. We walked out to the eastern edge of the property and over the seawall and out to where the stunted trees met the water.
We stopped in a place where a soft beach of soil separated the willows. We sat for a moment while my aunt recovered from the long walk. I dug my hands deep into the earth. I learned, on one of our earliest trips to the river, that she liked to swim naked. The first time she’d taken off her clothes, she did so in the water, fearful I’d be frightened by the sight of her scars. But it didn’t bother me—I’d seen them before, when I spied on her that night after she first arrived in our home. So I stripped down too, and from that day onward it seemed unimaginable that anyone should step into the water clothed.
We swam under the shade of the willows and the quarantine wall. On one of our trips to the river I had asked her why the wall was there. She said the people on the other side had been infected with a sickness, and the wall was built to keep them from making others sick. I asked her what kind of sickness. She said the kind where you don’t ever get better, the kind you can’t help but pass on to your children, and they to theirs.
To the east a guard looked on from the tower. I waved at him but he didn’t wave back. At first the guards scared me, but my aunt told me they were not human beings, just a pair of eyes unable to harm or help anyone or anything. I thought of them now in the same way I thought of the stick-figure children my mother had painted on the levee, and I was no longer scared.
We dried ourselves in the sun, naked by the riverbank. Even now, her body astounded me: the strange rivulets of scarred skin that lined her upper arms and shoulders, dead-looking and paler than the rest of her; the way her breasts and stomach sagged; the smoothness of her shaved head. In her presence I could think of nothing strong enough to harm us. Not the river, nor the wall, nor whatever lay beyond the wall.
“Is Dana your sister?” I asked. The question had been weighing on my mind for weeks, ever since I heard her say Dana’s name when she was talking to my father one night. I knew the woman in one of the pictures on our staircase wall was my other aunt, but my parents had never told me much about her.
The question seemed to take her by surprise.
“That’s right,” she said. “My sister and your father’s sister.”
“Does she live in Atlanta?”
“No. She’s dead.”
“How did she die?” I asked.
“You know the Birds that fly around here sometimes?”
“Sure.”
“Well, they’re empty now; they just fly around doing nothing until their solar panels break down or their wings crack and they crash in a field somewhere. But before you were born, they used to be weapons. They use to drop bombs from their stomachs.”
It seemed such a ridiculous thing—birds that drop bombs from their stomachs. But like the squiggly things in the soil or the fish with whiskers or the old coastal cities now buried underneath the sea, I believed it. I believed it because she said it.
“You know, she lives right here now, my sister.” Sarat pointed at the water. “After she died, instead of burying her in the ground, I buried her in the river.”
“Why?” I asked.
“I wanted her to never stop moving.”
“If I die, will you bury me in the river?”
My aunt chuckled. “It’ll be a good long while before you die,” she said. “I’ll be gone before then.”
“How about if you die?” I said. “Do you want me to bury you in the river?”
She was dumbstruck, as though she’d never considered it before. She smiled.
“Yeah,” she said. “I’d be grateful if you did.”
I leaned against her arm, and put my own arm around her. She was mine and I loved her.
WHEN WE RETURNED from the river there was a man at the gate. He was a stranger to me, dressed in a fine prewar suit and a green tie. He stood just outside the gate, his car parked in the driveway, peering in. We walked up the road to meet him.
It wasn’t until we were very close to the gate that my aunt’s damaged eyes finally made out the stranger. She stood a long time staring at him, her face empty.
“Go on inside, Benjamin,” she said. “I’ll be in in a minute.”
I asked her who the man was, but she ordered me inside again in a tone that let me know it was best not to ask any more questions.
She opened the gate. She inspected the man who stood before her, the man she hadn’t seen in many years. He had aged, but he had aged well. The silver wings of hair and the thick black mustache, now also graying, were little changed from when she’d last seen him among the ruins of Lake Sinclair all those years ago.
“Hello, Joe,” she said. “I thought you’d be long gone by now.”
“Hello, Sarat,” said Joe. Instantly she recognized his faraway accent. “I’m sorry I didn’t visit sooner. I didn’t know they had set you free.”
She ushered him to the woodshed. I watched them from my bedroom window, hoping to catch a snippet of their conversation, but they walked silently and shut the door behind them.
I only learned what he said to her later, when I read it. By then it was too late.
THEY SAT ON STOOLS by the workbench. She saw that he had not changed, his cool air of charm the same as it had been in their old clandestine meetings.
“He’s a cute boy,” said Joe, pointing in the direction of the house. “Is he…?”
“He’s my nephew.”
“I see— How are you, Sarat?” he asked.
“Alive,” my aunt replied.
“I want to say, first of all, that I didn’t know what Albert Gaines had done. A long time ago he’d sent his daughter and her mother to live in the Bouazizi Empire, so they would be safe during the war, and I’m told his interrogators told him they’d learned of their whereabouts, and used it as leverage against him. He was not a coward when I knew him, Sarat, and I…”
“Don’t,” she said. “It doesn’t matter.”
Joe nodded. She saw that he was doing now what everyone she’d known from before her time in prison had done—he was staring, trying to reconcile the shape and size and damage of her now with the recollected image of the lanky teenager he’d once known.
Finally he said, “I know what they must have done to you in that place, Sarat, and I am truly sorry.”
“You didn’t come here just to tell me that.”
“That’s correct,” Joe said. “I understand that you were able to meet one of your old prison guards. I understand that you were able to exact some measure of revenge.”
Sarat laughed. “Revenge,” she echoed. “Revenge, revenge. I hurt one man. Do you think it was just one man who hurt me?”
“If you would like, I can ask my contacts to look for others,” Joe said. “Many of the guards who were stationed at Sugarloaf when you were there are back on the mainland now. Perhaps…”
“Why stop there?” she said. “Why don’t you line them all up for me—can you do that, Joe?—you line up every man who made me what I am: the ones who killed my father, the ones who killed my sister, the ones who killed my mother, the ones who made it so my brother will never be whole again, the ones who drove us from our home, the ones who slaughtered all those people in Patience. You line up the whole lot of them for me, Joe. Then I’ll have my revenge.”
“And supposing I could?” Joe asked.
A grimace of light shone through the cracks in the boards.
“Say what you mean,” my aunt replied.
“For several years, I cultivated a relationship with a young man in the North,” said Joe. “A man named Tusk, a scientist who has dedicated his life to finding a cure for the disease the Blue government once used to silence the people of South Carolina. But even though he spent many years trying, he failed, and in the process he created something far worse—another disease of sorts, capable of wiping out entire cities, entire nations. He is in many ways a broken man, Sarat. And last year I arranged a deal with him—in exchange for the thing he created, I have offered him refuge in my home country, away from the war and everything he has had to endure.
“The Reunification Ceremony is coming up in a few months. The war will be over, and no matter what your new Southern politicians say, it will have been won by the North. But if someone were to go to Columbus and release this disease, it would change the tide of the war, change the victor, change everything. I want to know if you wish to be the one to do it, Sarat.”
A silence shrouded the room. Light turned to heat on the still uncovered soil. He waited on her answer.
“You don’t need me to do it,” she said.
“That’s right. I could have one of my contacts in the North do it. It would be much easier to do it that way, I suspect. The Blues have thousands of new guards on patrol at the border crossings, and the ones I used to have some influence with are gone. But I wanted to offer it to you first, because I know how much you have fought and how much you have suffered. You want something the size of your vengeance, Sarat? This, I believe, is the size of your vengeance.”
They heard a fleeting sound outside. A laborer wheeling fresh soil to the greenhouses. Then it was quiet again.
“Tell me your real name,” my aunt said.
“My real name is Yousef Bin Rashid. I am seventy-one years old. I work for the government of the Bouazizi Empire.”
“Yousef,” Sarat repeated, letting her tongue whip every syllable. “You-sef.”
“It doesn’t really matter to you, does it,” she asked, “who wins this war?”
“No. It does not.”
“Then why? Why be a part of it?”
“I come from a new place, Sarat,” Yousef said. “My people have created an empire. It is young now, but we intend it to be the most powerful empire in the world. For that to happen, other empires must fail. I think by now you understand that, if it were the other way around—if the South was on the verge of winning—perhaps I would be having this conversation in Pittsburgh or Columbus. I don’t want to lie to you, Sarat: this is a matter of self-interest, nothing more.”
Sarat smiled at the thought. “You couldn’t just let us kill ourselves in peace, could you?”
“Come now,” said Yousef. “Everyone fights an American war.”
They were both quiet, and in the silence Sarat was reminded of something Albert Gaines had told her. He asked her once if she knew how the word Red came to be shorthand for the South. She said it was politics, something to do with who voted for the old Republican Party back when it was all still one country.
But Gaines said it was older than all that, older than the country itself. He said it was about the dirt: in the South there’s a mineral in the ground that turns the dirt red. He said when you’ve leached all the good from the earth, all the nutrients that a seedling needs to grow, the last thing left is the stuff that turns the dirt red.
She wondered now if maybe that was the only honest thing he’d ever told her.
“It’ll kill everyone it touches, this sickness you have?” she asked Yousef.
“You have my word,” Yousef replied.
“I’m never going back to that prison. No matter what happens, I’m never going back.”
“You have my word.”
She stood from her stool and walked to the doors and flung them open. Blistering daylight flooded the shed. She looked out at the new house that stood where the old one used to be, and at the wilting trees and the river imprisoned by walls. The world about her shook with heat.
“Do you ever get sick of this place, Yousef?” she asked. “Ever wish you could just be done with it, just go home, back to your family, back to the world you know?”
“Of course,” Yousef replied. “I hope to go home one day soon.”
“Me too,” she said.
FROM THEN ON she was distant. Once more she barricaded herself in that shed, just like she did when she first arrived. This time the door was closed and locked; I couldn’t see inside.
I was so desperate to reach her that I spent hours kneeling outside the shed’s back wall with my ear against the boards, listening. All I ever heard was the scratch of old pen on paper.
I lay awake at night wondering what I had done to drive her away. Was she disappointed in me—had I failed to defeat the river current one too many times? Had I nagged her with too many questions? Did I bore her? In desperation, I scribbled the word “Sorry” on a blank sheet of paper and slid it under her door. She made no reply.
ON A SATURDAY in the middle of June, while my parents were at a farmers’ trade show in Montgomery, she left the house for a day. We kept a used Tik-Tok on the property for emergencies; she took it.
She drove to the market in Lincolnton. It was a smaller crowd than usual, the town still cleaning up the last of the damage from Hurricane Scott. She walked past the half-empty stalls to the end of the road, where Marcus stood watch.
Without speaking they went to the church nearby. This time she went in first and he followed.
“Goddamn I’m glad you showed up today,” said Marcus. “You know what I just heard from one of the Free Southerner boys? You remember that old man Prince Wendell, used to run a coffee shop out in the middle of the ocean? They’re gonna name a street in Atlanta after him. Guess someone on one of those Reunification prep committees heard about him, and they decided to do it. Thought it would look good to honor a man who worked with both sides. I thought you’d get a kick out of—”
“Sit down,” my aunt said. “I need to talk to you.”
Marcus sat beside her on the pew. “Sure,” he said.
My aunt handed her friend a small folded piece of paper. On it was written the name and contact information of a man.
“There’s someone I know. I want you to go talk to him. He can arrange for you to leave this place, to leave all of this, and go start a new life on the other side of the world.”
Marcus stared at the paper, confused.
“Sarat, it’s all coming to an end,” he said. “In a few months there’s going to be no more war. It’ll all be one country again. And then, I swear to you, you won’t believe how quickly everyone forgets all about this.”
My aunt shook her head. “Please, Marcus. Just go see him.”
Marcus took the paper from her hand. “The war’s over, Sarat,” he said, and this time it didn’t sound as though he was trying to reassure her.
“I know, Marcus,” she said. She kissed him. She stood. “I know.”
SHE LEFT LINCOLNTON and drove west to the outer suburbs of Atlanta, in the shadows of the factories and the vertical farms. She went to Stone Mountain, on the easternmost outskirts of the city. Near the dilapidated, flat bungalows of the old village there stood an unmarked, redbrick storefront. It was to this meager slice of real estate that the United Rebels had been relegated.
When she arrived she found only Adam Bragg Jr. and Trough in the office. It was a small space—once a restaurant or a bakery—and longer than it was wide. Chairs stood upturned on their tables, except for where Bragg sat, nursing a cup of coffee.
He stood when he saw her. “Well hello there,” he said. “Who’d have thought the great Sarat Chestnut would come visit us in our new home.”
He beckoned her to the chair opposite him at the table. Even stripped of its old cash register and front counter, the place felt claustrophobic, the walls lined with cheap dark wood and decorated with ancient posters that urged: “Have a Coke.”
Trough stood in the back of the room, near where the chairs and tables gave way to stacks of unopened moving boxes. The first time she had seen him after her release from Sugarloaf—on the day they took her to meet her old captor—she hadn’t recognized him. But he looked familiar now, thin like his older brother; eyes numb and accusing.
“Can you believe it’s come to this?” said Bragg. “Cast out into the wilderness, disowned by our own people. You know what they put in that building we used to be in—the one downtown, under the highway—after they forced us out? The new office of the Reunification Celebration Committee.”
He laughed and shook his head. “They got a whole building of people deciding where to hang the balloons and send the marching bands to celebrate the day we surrender. Jesus, I wish my dad was alive to see it. It would have killed that old bastard twice.”
“I need your help,” my aunt said.
Bragg motioned for Trough to make more coffee. With his eyes still on my aunt, the young man complied.
“Name it,” Bragg said. “We ain’t got much, but what we got is yours.”
“If I told you I could turn it all around—kill every last one of them who run the Blue, wipe out the North, make it so they don’t see the sun for a hundred years—would you believe me?”
“Yeah, I’d believe you,” said Bragg. “I wouldn’t believe anybody else who said it, but I’d believe you.”
Trough placed a cup of coffee on the table and returned to his post, watching.
“I need you to get me across the border,” my aunt said. “I need to be in Columbus for the Reunification Ceremony.”
“Christ, Sarat, it can’t be done,” said Bragg. “They got more men guarding the Tennessee line ahead of that goddamn ceremony than they did during the height of the war. Every crossing’s a fortress, and they ain’t letting a single Southerner through, probably not until the end of the year.”
“What about the tunnels?” my aunt asked. “The ones we used to crawl through to get near Halfway Branch?”
“Sarat, they demolished those years ago. That world don’t exist no more. Hell, other than Trough here, I got three, maybe four good men left. They wore our people down; everyone’s tired and hungry and they all lost the will for war. Go see it for yourself on your way back home—drive into Atlanta proper, look at all those billboards the Free Southern State put up—‘Peace With Dignity,’ ‘Respecting Our Past, Securing Our Future.’ All that horseshit, and people eat it up. You know they don’t even call themselves the Free Southern State anymore? They just use the acronym, never spell it out, like the letters don’t mean nothing. They’re waving their cowardice around like a goddamn flag—”
“I know a way,” said Trough. “I know how you can get to Columbus.”
Bragg fell silent.
“How?” my aunt asked.
Trough came to the table. “There’s a medical shuttle that goes up north. St. Joseph’s has a deal with a hospital up in Lexington. They get to ship a few people up there on the first of every month. They cap it at a dozen patients, and they keep it quiet. But I know the guy who runs it; he and my brother spent some time up at the Tennessee line together. He owed my brother a favor from back then, and there’s no one but me left to collect. I’ll tell him I got a friend who’ll die if she don’t get treatment up north. He’ll bump someone and put you on. Then soon as you cross the border, you can make your way to Columbus.”
Bragg stared at his lieutenant, dumbfounded. He turned to my aunt. “But if you’re really gonna kill as many as you say, that means you’re gonna take something with you—a weapon, a bomb, something. And just because it’s a medical shuttle don’t mean the Blues won’t search it.”
“They won’t find what I’m bringing,” my aunt said. “They can search me all they want, they won’t find it.”
“I have one condition,” said Trough.
“What’s that?” my aunt asked.
“I go with you.”
“The thing I’m going to use, you can’t aim it. It’s a sickness, a kind that will spread to every last one of them in Columbus. Nobody going on this trip is coming back.”
“I go with you,” said Trough.
“No.”
“Let him, Sarat,” said Bragg. “He’s been rotting here praying to be with his family for going on ten years. Give him what he wants—you owe it to his brother, just like that man from St. Joe’s.”
“I don’t owe anybody a single thing,” my aunt said.
Bragg sighed and rubbed his temples. “Let me ask you something, Sarat. During all that time you spent in Sugarloaf getting interrogated, did they ever once ask you whether you had anything to do with the killing of that Blue general, Weiland?”
“No.”
“But that’s the one thing you actually did. All that other stuff they must have asked you about, you probably didn’t have a single useful thing to tell them. But the one guy you killed, they never once asked you about him. Why do you think that is?”
“I don’t know,” my aunt said.
“I’ll tell you why. They didn’t ask you about it because two days after they picked you up, that boy Attic walked right up to the Blue border guards at Harrogate and turned himself in. He told them it was him who killed the general. He made them believe it—told them all the details he knew from listening to us talk about it, except with him as the shooter. Now they got him locked away in Sugarloaf too—in a place called Camp Sunday where they keep the ones they won’t even do the mercy of killing. That’s why they never asked you about the one thing you did, Sarat. That’s why you’re free.”
“That was his choice,” my aunt said. “I never asked him to do it.”
“Nobody asked him to do it, but that don’t change the fact he did. And it don’t change the fact that you’re alive and sitting here now because of it.”
Bragg pointed at Trough. “I know you’ve been through hell, Sarat. I know you had things done to you and I know you were a different girl before. But these boys never even had a before. They were dead before they got a shot at living. Give him what he wants. Let him be with his brothers.”
Trough stood at the table, eyes blue and still, his face unchanged.
“Make it happen,” my aunt told him, “and you can come with me.”
Trough nodded. The last of the Salt Lake Boys left the old brick store.
Bragg stood. He walked to the back of the room, where the unopened moving boxes lay stacked. He began to rummage through them.
“You know, I always used to wonder what lines he used on you,” Bragg said.
“Who used on me?”
“Gaines, when he was trying to recruit you. He had all these different plans of attack, you know, when he was trying to bring someone into the fold. Like if a kid was religious, he’d start talking to them about how it was God’s will for the South to emerge victorious. Or if they were insecure, he’d talk to them about the ever-accepting rebel family. But he always told my father you were too sharp for all that. Too curious too—what was the word he used?—truculent. I had to go look that one up. He said if the course of life don’t recruit her to the cause, no man will.”
Bragg returned to the table, a small bronze star in hand. “Well, Sarat Chestnut, I thank God the course of life recruited you.”
He set the star on the table and passed it to her. It was a pin, rusted and slightly warped.
“My father had these made a long time ago,” said Bragg. “He had them cast in the style of the old Southern State flag. Did you know they drew the stars on that flag all wrong? Had the right-facing edges longer than the others; never bothered to fix it. My father had all these grand visions of a proper Southern rebel army. And so he had these little medals of valor made up so he could hand them out for ‘Meritorious military service in the war against the Northern enemy.’”
Bragg chuckled. “Poor bastard didn’t even get to hand out one.”
My aunt held the rebel star in her hand. The pin in the back held fast to its catch with rust, and would not open.
“Is it really going to work, this thing you have?” asked Bragg. “When you set it loose in Columbus, it’ll be enough to kill all of them—the Blues, the Southern traitors, the whole lot of ’em?”
“Everyone,” my aunt said.
Bragg reached over and took my aunt’s hand in his. “You’re going to be remembered, Sarat,” he said. “You’ll be a hero to the Southern cause for as long as the South exists. When this is over they’ll build cities in your name.”
My aunt pulled her hand away. She tossed the flawed star to the ground. She stood.
“Fuck the South,” she said. “Fuck the South and everything it stands for.”
