American War(119)

And I learned what had been done to her and what she’d done. In Patience, in Halfway Branch, in that floating prison in the Florida Sea. I learned about the day they’d drowned her, and the day that strange foreign man came to our farm and offered her the means to drown them back.

By the time I’d finished reading, there were no more means of escape, no more means of delusion. Laid bare on the page was the truth of it: she was not some accessory or accomplice. It was her that did it.

That was her last act of cowardice, all those decades later: forcing me to understand her, forcing me to choose what to do with the secret.

So I chose.

On the day I had finally taken from them all there was to take, I piled the diaries in a pyre and set them ablaze. If I had wanted to, I could have sold them for a criminal sum to one of the many wealthy history buffs who collect civil war memorabilia. I could have donated them anonymously to a museum, or to the Civil War Archive Project or to the Committee for Truth and Reunification. But I couldn’t keep myself from burning them. It was the only way I had left to hurt her.



SHE’S ALMOST GONE from me now. I’ve lived to be older than she was, older than my parents. But sometimes I still think about what she must have seen in the days after she gave me away, when she finally set foot in the Blue country.

On her way to Columbus she would have driven along the great Sunbelt highway, the road glimmering like a sheet of diamonds—past metropolises packed with the children and grandchildren of the original inland pilgrims. She would have seen the huge looming billboards commemorating Reunification, some of them vandalized with graffiti—the letters “KAR” painted big and blue—by angry Northerners who still believed the South was getting away with it all too easy.

I imagine her among the crowd at the Reunification Day Ceremony, silently wheeling herself to the site of the grand parade, the poison radiating from her hulking frame. The crowd would have parted to let her through—they would have seen her torture scars and her shaven head and her hunchbacked spine and they would have felt pity.

I remember once, when we were swimming in the Savannah, she tried to hold her breath underwater. I sat by the bank and timed her, counting the seconds as best I could. From the size of her, I imagined she would spend an eternity submerged. But her lungs were weak and quickly she surfaced.

As she sucked in the air, I saw a look on her face I’d never seen before. It was relief, as though she’d spent not a few seconds, but an entire lifetime suffocating, and was now finally free.

I wonder, sometimes, if that’s the way she must have felt the moment she put the poison inside her and readied to wheel herself into Reunification Square—an overwhelming relief, the opposite of drowning.



THERE’S ONLY ONE PAGE from Sarat Chestnut’s diaries I didn’t burn. It’s the first page of the first book. I carry it in my wallet, and every now and then I read the opening lines.

When I was young, I lived with my parents and my brother and my sister in a small house by the Mississippi Sea.

I was happy then.





ACKNOWLEDGMENTS


I owe Anna Mehler Paperny, Anne McDermid, and Sonny Mehta a debt I can never repay. They are the reason this book exists.

For their support during the two years it took to complete this novel, and more so for their friendship, I am grateful to Donald Richardson, Wesley Fok, Carolyn Smart, Daniel Dagris, Martin Lendahls, Missy Ladygo, and Isaac Pendergrass.

At Knopf, Edward Kastenmeier, Tim O’Connell, and Andrew Ridker guided this project through the editing process with patience and care. I’m a better writer for having worked with them. I am also indebted to Suzanne Smith, Leslie Levine, and Nicholas Latimer for their kindness, skill, and enthusiasm.

And to my mother, Nivin, the bravest, kindest human being I know. Whatever courage I possess is hers, whatever goodness I possess is hers.

And to Theresa, always, and for so, so much.





A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR


Omar El Akkad was born in Cairo, Egypt, and grew up in Doha, Qatar, before moving to Canada. He worked as a journalist at The Globe and Mail, and his coverage of a 2006 terror plot earned him a National Newspaper Award for Investigative Reporting (Canada). His other journalistic work includes dispatches from the NATO-led war in Afghanistan, the military trials at Guantánamo Bay, the Arab Spring revolution in Egypt, and the Black Lives Matter movement in Ferguson, Missouri. He now lives with his wife in the woods just south of Portland, Oregon.