American War(113)

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.”