American War(103)

“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.”