American War(112)

“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.”



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.