American War(104)

“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.