SHE LEFT STONE MOUNTAIN. She drove west, through the capital and through the state, into Alabama. She went to the forest. For the last time, she went to see Albert Gaines.
The Talladega forest was thinner than she remembered it, the trees seemingly further apart. But the path to the cabin was the same, singed in her memory from all those times she’d stalked through this place, picking off cans, hunting rats.
She intended to gut the old man the way she’d gutted the guard who’d drowned her.
She opened the door and found him sitting inside, asleep in his chair.
Bragg had told her he’d suffered a stroke in the detention camp, right after he and the other recruiters had been rounded up. She saw the damage on the right side of his face. He was sitting in an old rusted wheelchair, wearing soiled pajamas whose stitching was coming apart. His hair was white and thin.
He looked old, ancient. His breathing was a fine whistle, the air leaking out of his mouth. She understood then why none of the remaining rebels had come out here to put a bullet in his head and stuff his mouth with the lining of his pockets. It would have been a kindness.
He woke at the sound of her footsteps. When he saw her he recoiled and his breathing grew quicker; his mouth opened but nothing came out. She saw his eyes, darting like gas lamp flames. For a moment he looked her over, unsure, but she knew he recognized her. Just like she knew she would always recognize him. Even if it had just been a pile of bones she found when she walked into that shack, she’d know it was him.
She looked around the room. Dirty dishes lined the table and filled the sink. There were clothes on the floor—not the fine suits she remembered, but undershirts and cheap pants from the sweatshops down south. In one corner of the room there was a bookshelf but it was empty.
On a table near the bed she saw the old stereo Gaines used to keep in his office in Patience. Of all the things in the cabin, only the stereo showed no accumulation of dust. She set it to play. The old classical number filled the room; the song of the weary pilgrim.
She knelt beside him. She drew in close. He was alien to her now, this feral, sickly old man. But what was inside him was still the same.
He looked at her. Between the soft heaves of his breathing he said, My daughter.
He said it again and again: My daughter, my daughter. Every time it sounded like an unfinished sentence, like there was more coming, but it was just those two words.
And then his breathing halted, and for a moment she thought that he had left her, that this was his final act of abuse: to die before her.
Then he exhaled and with the exhale came all of what he’d been trying to say.
“They said they would hurt my daughter.”
She took the knife from her pocket, the knife he’d given her all those years ago. She opened his gnarled fingers to reveal the yellow skin of his palm. She gave it back to him.
IN LATE JUNE the storms subsided and new crops were born. For months my mother had tried in secret to grow strawberries in the greenhouses, and suddenly the plants began to deliver. The leaves sagged with berries thick as fists, dark and bursting with juice. My mother invited all her friends to come try the farm’s newest produce, and all agreed the strawberries were the best they’d ever had.
One night, my parents got into an argument. Afterward my father went outside for a walk. Sometimes when he wanted to be alone, he sat on the levee, looking out at the river and the quarantine wall.
In a while his sister emerged from her shed and joined him.
They sat under the light of a copper moon. A westward wind made the willow leaves dance like charmed snakes. The river moved.
“She wants to go north, after they sign the treaty,” my father said. “To Pittsburgh or upstate New York. She wants to sell the farm and the house and move there.”
Sarat tried to gauge the state of her brother’s lucidity, whether he was liable to leave her and wander to his clouded place.
“And what do you want?” she asked.
“I don’t want to go.”
The sound of humming motors came across the water. Somewhere, shielded by the night, a dredging ship slowly changed the shape of the river.
“I remember when we were kids back in Louisiana and Dad first said he was going to go up to the permit office in Baton Rouge and try to get a pass to the North,” my aunt said. “I still remember how much you hated him for it. You kept telling Dana and me how anyone that wants to go up to the Blue country is a traitor. One time I even saw you packing a little bag and burying it in the dirt near that raft you had, like if Dad really tried to make us go north, you’d just take your things and sail off into the Mississippi Sea, go live on one of those man-made islands in the Gulf.”
She chuckled. She turned to look at her brother and saw that he was smiling, his eyes cast down at his feet.
“You don’t remember any of it, do you?” she said.
My father shook his head. “It just gets away from me sometimes. I can…” He rubbed his temple. “Truth is I’d be happier if I didn’t remember any of it, if there wasn’t anything left of it at all.”
My aunt watched the guards in their towers on the other side of the river. She wondered if it was the same boys from her youth who still guarded the quarantine wall. The only signs of them now were small pulsing lights that blinked red against the darkness.
“It’s strange, isn’t it,” she said, “what sticks with you and what doesn’t, the things you decide to keep. The night after the massacre at Patience, I remember I’d sent Dana away, and the soldiers had taken you to the morgue, thinking you were dead, but I didn’t want to leave. Some of the bodies were still there, you could still smell that burning in the air, from when they’d tossed the dead in the fire—but I wanted to stay. I wanted to find Mama, anything that was left of her, even if it was just ash. Finally the soldiers told me I had ten minutes to get my things before they were going to tie me up and throw me on the last bus out. So I went back, and you know what I took? I took Dad’s old statue, the Virgin of Guadalupe; I took that turtle Marcus and I kept as a pet; I took a couple of old photos from Mama’s bunk. I didn’t take any clothes, didn’t take any of the money Mama had saved up all her life. Not a single useful thing. Just junk.”
“It wasn’t junk,” my father said. “It was our past.”
“That’s exactly what it was,” she said. “There’s this passage in one of the books Albert Gaines once gave me. It said in the South there is no future, only three kinds of past—the distant past of heritage, the near past of experience, and the past-in-waiting. What they’ve got up there in the Blue—what your wife wants, what our parents wanted—is a future.”
“If we go up north,” my father asked, “will you come with us?”
“Don’t ask me that,” my aunt replied.
An impotent Bird flew overhead, invisible in the evening sky. She remembered the first time she’d heard one of them after she’d been released from Sugarloaf—how she instinctively dove to the ground, covered her ears, breathed out lest the pressure wave of a nearby blast shatter her lungs. And then later, rising from the floor, wondering how it could be that in all her waking hours since the day they drowned her she felt not an ounce of will to live, and yet in that moment of perceived danger she had so quickly sought to protect herself, to stave off death. Why did the thought of violence against her only terrify her when it came at the hands of anyone but herself? She did not know.
“I want you to do something for me,” she said to her brother.
“All right,” my father said.
“I want you to forgive me.”
“Forgive you for what?”
“For doing something terrible,” my aunt said. “For taking so much away from you.”
“You never took anything away from me, Sarat. You took care of me, after Patience. Karina told me how you came back for me, how everyone thought I was dead but you and Dana wouldn’t give up…”
“That’s a lie. I wanted you to be dead. The first time I saw you after they brought you home, saw how badly they’d hurt you, I wished you’d never survived. That’s what I am, Simon. Makes no difference now how I got to be that way, it’s what I am. I don’t want you to love me, I don’t want you to tell me I did nothing wrong. I want you to know I did wrong, and I want you to forgive me. Please, I’m begging you, just say you’ll forgive me.”
“I forgive you,” my father said. “I forgive you.”
She sank then into her brother’s arms. And for the first time since she was a little girl at Patience, stained with the blood of the first man she ever killed, she wept.
She never saw her brother again.
****
THE FOLLOWING MORNING I woke just before dawn, startled by the sound of our car moving up the driveway. In the twilight I saw my aunt park near the unused greenhouse in which she hid her secret things. I inched the bedroom window open and watched.
She opened the trunk, then she disappeared inside the greenhouse, shovel in hand. For a while I saw nothing, but soon she emerged, her hands black with soil. I watched her take dozens of dirt-stained diaries from the greenhouse and pack them in the trunk of the car. Then she drove away from the house. The front gate opened but the doorbell made no sound.
She was gone the whole day. She returned in the early hours of the following morning. In the darkness I heard her cavernous footfalls on the stairs. My bedroom door creaked open. There was no light but I knew it was her.
She came close to where I lay and knelt by my bedside. She turned on the lamp. It had been a long time since I’d seen her face so close. I felt the heat of her on me. I stared, wide-eyed.
“Hey,” she said, “you want to go on an adventure?”
At the sound of that word, all the fog of sleep instantly left me. I nodded.
“Follow me,” she said, “and be very quiet.”
I watched her open my dresser drawers and pack a few changes of clothes into a small backpack. “Here,” she said, handing it to me, “you’ll need this.”
Still in my pajamas, I trailed her to the car outside. Slowly she drove up the driveway, and I saw the wires hanging from the panel she’d broken, the one that made the doorbell ring. We slipped silently past the gate.
I asked her where we were going, but she said it was a surprise. We seemed to drive forever, away from the sun. The sky was blue behind us but black ahead.
Eventually I fell back asleep. When I woke it was early afternoon and we were in unfamiliar country. The highway along which the car raced was hugged by endless browning fields. I saw broken-down signs for motels and restaurants of which only wreckage remained.
We were coming up on water. I could see it in the distance—a vast brown river, thick as honey. Again I asked her where we were going, but she would not say.
Before we reached the water, she pulled onto a small dirt road that scythed a path through the myrtle trees. The trees had lost their color but the ground was littered with the remains of pink baptisia. We parked near one of the trees, around which a white strip of cloth had been tied.
She got out of the car. I followed. For a while she just stood there, saying nothing. I begged her to tell me what we were doing, but she simply told me to wait. I was still electric with the sense of adventure.
A dark sedan rolled up the road to meet us.
Two men emerged from the car. One was tall and burly, the other short, both bearded. The short one came to where we stood and looked me over.
“That him?” he asked.
“Yeah,” my aunt said. “You know what to do?”
“Won’t be a problem,” the short man said. “Be about a month getting out to the coast, then however long the smugglers take, but we’ll take good care of him, don’t you worry.”
I watched her give two envelopes to the man. He opened one and counted the cash inside. The other had my name on it, and was sealed.
“Don’t give that one to him until he’s a man,” she said.
I asked her what was going on.
She knelt down to face me. “You have to go with these men for a while,” she said. “They’re going to take you to a safe place. Don’t worry, everything’s going to be all right.”
“I don’t want to go with them,” I said. “I want to stay with you.”
“I’m sorry, Benjamin,” she replied. “It has to be this way.”
The short man picked me up. I screamed and kicked at him, my heels driving into his shins. I begged her not to let me go.
As the short man carried me to the waiting car, I saw the tall one shake Sarat’s hand.
“I just want to say it’s an honor to finally meet you, Miss Chestnut,” he said. “I heard what you did at Halfway Branch way back when. You’re a true patriot of the South.”
“Make sure he gets a good life up there,” she said.
“Yes ma’am,” the man replied. He returned to the car. We started moving. I slammed my hands against the rear window as the hulking frame of my aunt grew smaller and finally disappeared.
The men drove toward the Mississippi River. I cried and called out for my mother. As soon as we were away from the meeting place, the shorter of the men turned around and slapped me across the face.
“I don’t give a shit whose nephew you are,” he said. “You keep squealing like that and I’ll break your goddamn jaw.”
I slunk back, stunned. I tasted the dull iron of blood in my mouth. It was the first time anyone had ever hit me.
The men waited till nightfall to cross the river. They crossed in an old rebel skiff, under moonless night.
“Welcome to Purple country, kid,” the short man said. “Nothing but cowards and traitors, far as the eye can see.”
For weeks, we drove westward. The men refused to travel during daylight hours, or to take major roads. The landscape turned alien—vast trays of sand, pierced by mesas colored caramel and orange. The desert was endless and littered with the wreckage of tanks and planes and makeshift camps from the earliest days of the war. They fed me nothing but old ration packs: meat in the form of powder and sickly sweet apricot gel that was designed never to go bad.
Sometimes we stopped in small, run-down villages manned by soldiers whose uniforms I’d never seen before. The people spoke a different language and I couldn’t read the street signs. Sometimes the soldiers pointed their rifles at my two kidnappers and asked them what their business was in the Protectorado. It was during these times I thought of screaming for help, but the shorter man told me if I opened my mouth he’d kill me.
One day the desert ended and a parched, desolate forest replaced it. The forest too seemed to stretch forever, but there was not a single living thing within it. Everywhere around me I was surrounded by the aftereffects of a fire.
By the time we reached the Pacific, I could no longer tell the days and weeks apart. The men camped in the concrete remains of a desalination plant half-submerged in the water. The sound of waves crashing against the side of the building became maddening as the weeks went by. I gathered from the two men’s conversations that the smuggler’s ship that was to take us from this place had capsized, and it would be another month before the next one came. We waited.
Every night, the men listened to a small radio for news. For weeks there was nothing, and then a burst of reports of a mystery illness radiating from Columbus, and then nothing again.
A vessel arrived in late October. It was an old fiberglass crabber, badly beaten and ill-suited for the ocean. From the moment the men dragged me onboard, I was green with seasickness.
The trip north was slow and rough. The captain kept close to the shoreline, and often the men cursed him and said he was going to run us ashore.
THEN ONE DAY I looked out the cabin window to see a strange city alight with floating glitter. As we neared the port, I saw places in the water where previous ships had run into the submerged barrier reefs.
“You made it, kid,” the shorter man said. “New Anchorage—the neutral state. Welcome home.”
Excerpted from: HEARING BEFORE THE COMMITTEE FOR TRUTH AND REUNIFICATION, ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY-THIRD CONGRESS (DECEMBER 1, 2123)
Members Present:
SENATOR ELI THOMPSON (New Reunificationist—Arkansas) Chair
SENATOR BARBARA AIKENS (Democrat—Cascadia/Oregon) Vice Chair
SENATOR PETER JINDAL (New Reunificationist—Missouri)
SENATOR CLAY NORMAN (Democrat—Illinois)
SENATOR BERNARD WILLIS (Democrat—Indiana)
Witnesses:
COLONEL BARRET SINGER (Ret.)
SEN. THOMPSON: Good morning, everyone. If we can get the screen up and running, I think we can pick up where we left off yesterday. Senator Aikens?
SEN. AIKENS: Thank you, Mr. Chair. Colonel, before we go back to the surveillance footage, I just wanted to ask you about something you mentioned yesterday. About the two soldiers who were manning the Rossville checkpoint—Private Martin Baker and, what was the other one’s name again?
COL. SINGER: Bud Baker Jr.
SEN. AIKENS: That’s right, thank you. You mentioned yesterday that they were—let me see…in your words, “wired for kinetics,” rather than border guard duty, is that correct?
COL. SINGER: Yes ma’am.
SEN. AIKENS: And what exactly did you mean by that, Colonel?
COL. SINGER: Well, certain young men, as soon as they arrive at the recruiter’s office, you can tell…What I mean is, if it had still been a hot war, I wouldn’t have assigned those boys to guard duty.
SEN. WILLIS: I think it’s pretty clear what the Colonel is saying, Senator. Those two boys were mean sons of bitches.
COL. SINGER: That would be an accurate description.
SEN. WILLIS: Can’t say I blame them, with what they’d been through.
SEN. AIKENS: Thank you, Colonel. Let’s go back to the video. Now, my understanding is that this is the only surviving footage of the crossing on that day?
COL. SINGER: That’s all we’ve got left, is the overhead. No ground-level, no audio.
SEN. AIKENS: So at the end of the day we’re left with what, exactly? Conjecture? A guess?
COL. SINGER: Well, ma’am, what we do know is that, shortly before the first cases appeared in Columbus, the same sickness was noted in the hospital to which this particular bus was headed. So there is some reason to believe that the person responsible for the virus could have come across the border on that bus.
SEN. AIKENS: But we have no manifest, no hospital records. Colonel, we don’t even know the name of anyone on this video except your two soldiers.
COL. SINGER: That’s right, ma’am. Obviously the decade of the Reunification Plague decimated many parts of this country, and countless records were lost. We’re left only with what survived.
SEN. AIKENS: Very well. Let’s play it. So the medical transport bus arrives at the checkpoint that day at around noon, is that correct?
COL. SINGER: Yes ma’am.
SEN. AIKENS: And there were no other vehicles or convoys of any kind cleared for passage to the North that day.
COL. SINGER: That’s right. It was two days to the Reunification Ceremony. The entire Southern border was on lockdown.
SEN. AIKENS: So the two soldiers at the Rossville checkpoint would have known ahead of time that this bus was to be allowed through?
COL. SINGER: They would have known it was an authorized vehicle, but we would never tell our soldiers to simply let a vehicle through. They would have known they would be expected to inspect the vehicle and check the paperwork of every passenger. Same as they would with anyone trying to come north from the Red.
SEN. AIKENS: So if we can go ahead and skip to the point where the passengers disembark…yes, thank you. Now at this point, one of the two young men—Private Martin Baker, I believe—is still inside the guard building. So what we have here is his brother, Bud Baker Jr., essentially ordering the passengers to line up for individual inspection. Is that correct, Colonel?
COL. SINGER: Yes ma’am. Again, standard procedure.
SEN. AIKENS: Now I see that, with the first two patients in line, Private Bud Jr. is perhaps a bit curt, but those interactions take just a minute or two. When he sees the third patient, however, I think it’s fairly evident that his demeanor changes, wouldn’t you say?
COL. SINGER: I suppose.
SEN. AIKENS: Any idea why?
COL. SINGER: Could be the size of the individual. You can see she appears to be a fairly intimidating woman, from a physical standpoint. Could be because she appears to be much younger than the first two people in line. Could be she reminded him of someone, or he thought he’d seen her before. Could be he just got a bad vibe from her—an instinctual thing.
SEN. AIKENS: So the young man who wheels her forward, he hands the travel permits to the Private for inspection. And now—if we can just pause it here—Colonel, can you tell me what the Private is saying here?
COL. SINGER: He’s asking her what her illness is.
SEN. AIKENS: He didn’t do that with the first two patients.
COL. SINGER: No ma’am.
SEN. AIKENS: And her reply?
COL. SINGER: The way she’s facing, the overhead doesn’t catch her face.
SEN. AIKENS: But is it a fair assessment, Colonel, to say that the Private doesn’t believe her?
COL. SINGER: I couldn’t tell you. Obviously he doesn’t just let her pass.
SEN. AIKENS: That’s right. He orders her to stand up.
COL. SINGER: That’s what the lip readers tell me.
SEN. AIKENS: And when the young man pushing her wheelchair interjects, the Private doesn’t hesitate to raise his rifle at him and order him to his knees.
COL. SINGER: Senator, you’re talking about two boys who were bound and blindfolded and made to sit there while a Red insurrectionist—one who was never captured—tortured and killed their father. You’re talking about two boys who lied about their age on the recruitment form so they could get out to the front, two boys who’d only been stationed at that crossing a few weeks. Obviously this isn’t the way we train our border guards to perform inspections. Maybe he was having a bad day. Unfortunately we’ll never know, given that, by the end of the week, everyone you see on that screen was dead.
SEN. AIKENS: That’s not what confuses me, Colonel. If we could move ahead…so he turns back to this woman in the wheelchair, and it’s safe to say he orders her to stand up once more. And when she doesn’t, he kicks her chair over, sending her to the ground near where that young man is kneeling. Now he’s got the rifle pointed at the two of them, and I would expect at this point that, at the very least, he’s going to detain these two, if not the other ten patients as well. You stop the video right here and ask me what’s going to happen next, and I would bet my bottom dollar that nobody’s going to cross the border that day.
COL. SINGER: I suppose.
SEN. AIKENS: But then the other soldier, Private Martin Baker, comes out from the guard building. And he immediately lowers his brother’s rifle, tries to defuse the situation, correct?
COL. SINGER: It appears so.
SEN. AIKENS: And then he looks at the medical permit—the same one his brother just inspected—and he looks at the young woman on the ground and the young man on his knees beside her. But he doesn’t detain them, he doesn’t interrogate them. He…well, I would go so far as to say he takes pity on them. He tells his brother to let them through. To let the whole convoy through.
COL. SINGER: Yes ma’am.
SEN. AIKENS: In fact, if my briefing notes are correct, I believe nobody else in line even had their paperwork checked after that. The guards simply ordered them back on the bus and let the bus through. If indeed the person responsible for the Reunification Plague was anywhere further back in line, he or she wouldn’t have even gotten a once-over, is that correct?
COL. SINGER: Yes ma’am.
SEN. AIKENS: And that’s what confounds me, Colonel. Here you have these two young soldiers. Both of them having suffered the horrific experience of witnessing their father killed by insurrectionists. Both of them, as you put it, “wired for kinetics.” And yet one seems ready to shoot two of the patients and the other helps them back to their feet and waves everyone through. Don’t you find that at least a little perplexing?
COL. SINGER: I’m not sure, ma’am.
SEN. AIKENS: I mean, I read the military records that survive, Colonel, and both these boys, in just a few weeks on the job, had been reprimanded numerous times for mistreating Southerners at that crossing, and this was at a time when hardly anybody was crossing at all. Obviously they joined the military because they were hell-bent on revenge against the people they held responsible for the killing of their father. And yet on this day, of all days, Private Martin Baker decides to show compassion. If indeed your hunch is correct, and in watching this video we are in fact watching whoever unleashed that terrible illness on our country, can you imagine how many millions of lives would have been saved if he hadn’t?
COL. SINGER: Neither of these boys knew that millions of lives were at stake, Senator. At the time, the Tennessee line had been quiet for the better part of a year. The Reunification Ceremony was just a couple of days away. All those two boys would have seen on that day was a busful of sick people headed north for treatment.
SEN. AIKENS: A busful of Southerners.
COL. SINGER: Maybe so, Senator. But I don’t think it would be unreasonable to expect that, in some circumstances, even someone hell-bent on revenge might find a temporary capacity for kindness.
SEN. AIKENS: No, Colonel. I suppose it wouldn’t.