American War(13)

“So we’re not Northerners because we’re from the South, and we’re not Southerners because we tried to move north,” Martina said. “Tell me what we are, then. Tell me what we are.”

Polk gave a piece of paper to Martina. On it was scribbled the time and location where the bus would be the following morning. “It’s not so bad at the camp, Martina,” she said. “They got good food—food straight from the aid ships, and free too. And they got places for the children to play. You’ll be safe there.”

“We’ll be cattle there.”

Polk pointed west. “Honey, it’s for the good of your children. They say the fighting’s closer to us now than ever before, and moving further east every day. The traitors in the Louisiana guard are letting the Blues march right onto our land, and they don’t care who they kill. In Patience you’ll be among your own. Your children will be safe, Martina. What else matters but that?”

Martina looked into the small steady eyes of her neighbor. “I’m staying in my home,” she said. “I’m going to claim my husband’s body and I’m going to bury him on his land and I’m going to stay in my home and if the war comes to my door then let it. I’m done waiting on the good favor of little boys with guns.”

“I did the best I could,” Polk said. “But you shouldn’t have said what you did about his people killing one of their own. They’re very sensitive to that.”



WHEN SHE RETURNED HOME Martina found Sarat buried up to her neck in mud by the riverbank. The girl squealed with delight as her brother piled on handfuls of the brown sludge. Dana sat on a nearby stump, watching with vague disapproval.

When he saw his mother Simon sprung to his feet. “She asked me to,” he said.

“Dig her out and get cleaned up,” Martina said. “And then go to bed.”

“Mama, Simon called you a liar,” Dana said.

“I did not,” Simon replied. He threw a scoop of mud in Dana’s direction.

“I won’t tell you again,” Martina said.

The children marched up the embankment. Sarat skipped ahead of them, slick with mud, the brackish scent of the earth latched on to her skin. She undressed as she walked, dispatching her overalls in the dirt path behind her, and stepped into the shower. Of the three children, she had the darkest skin; Dana and Simon had inherited the brown of their father, Sarat the black of her mother.

Martina brought a change of clothes for her daughter and left them on an upturned water bucket by the stall. Soon the children had all washed and changed. One by one they kissed their mother and retreated into the house.

Martina sat alone on the hickory chair. She ate the sandwich crusts the children had left behind, and the last wet remnants of the canned meat. Still hungry, she stepped quietly into the house and took from the refrigerator a packet of apricot-flavored gel. It was an orange-colored paste of gelatinous texture. It came in a plain silver packet and had once been part of a military ration kit. In the South such kits, sold or discarded or given away, inevitably found their way to the gray market, where they were ripped open and their parts sold off individually. It was highly prized food, not for its taste but because of its utility, the energy it provided.

Instead of returning to the hickory chair, Martina found herself walking—not east to the river or north to the sorghum fields but west, behind the house and along the little-used paths that cut back through the brown-capped weeds to what remained of the inland town.

In the early winter, when the weather cooled and demand for labor grew, this was the route her husband took to the factory in Donaldsonville. There was a shuttle bus that stopped close to the Chestnuts’ property, but most days he chose to walk. He followed the footpath through the weeds to where it met a country road. Two miles in, the road crossed a pair of unused railway tracks, thick bushels of grass growing between the crossties.

Martina walked the same road toward the tracks. She moved carefully, cognizant of the deep fissures and cracks in which an ankle could easily turn. Where they still stood and their autonomous solar panels still functioned, a few roadside lights cast white halos on the ground. Otherwise the road was dark.

Just east of where the road met the tracks there stood the ruins of a small farmhouse once owned by friends of Martina’s parents. Near the house was a cotton field, long ago gone to seed.

Martina left the road and walked along the dirt driveway. Ahead of her, the simple wooden farmhouse stood frozen in mid-collapse. A cascade of storms coming off the Mississippi Sea had slowly pushed the walls from their moorings, but not enough to bring the structure down. Instead the home leaned visibly to the west, a teetering parallelogram.

Every once in a while, when she needed time alone, Martina came to this place. But for the occasional beer bottle or empty cigarette pack left on the front steps by a drifter, the home never showed signs of life. At the western end of the property there stood a many-limbed pecan tree. Long ago, from its thickest branch, the family hung a tire swing. Since childhood this place was Martina’s refuge. Beyond the tree, the land was flat and the view unsoiled for what seemed to be the entirety of western Louisiana.

But in the darkness there was nothing to be seen, the sky a uniform black. Only the Birds flew overhead—soundless warring craft designed to spy and to kill from great distance, their movement and intent once controlled by men in faraway places, who had only the grainy, pixelated footage of vaporized targets to gnaw on their conscience. Early in the war, the Birds were the Union’s most effective weapon, until a group of rebels detonated a bomb at the military server farm that kept the drones under the control of their remote pilots. Now the machines, powered by the solar panels that lined their wings, flew rogue, abandoned to the skies, their targets and trajectories random.