American War(3)

In a coop behind the house the family kept an emaciated clutch of chickens. They were loud and moved nervously, their feathers dirty and brown. When they were fed and the weather was not too hot, they produced eggs. In other times, if they were on the edge of revolt or death, they were preemptively slaughtered, their necks pinned down between the nails in a nearby stump.

The shipping container was segmented by standing clapboards. Benjamin and Martina Chestnut lived in the back of the home. Nine-year-old Simon and the six-year-old twins shared the middle third, living in a peace that grew more and more uneasy by the day.

In the final third of the home there was a small kitchen table of sand-colored plywood, smeared and notched from years of heavy use. Near the table a pine pantry and jelly cabinet held sweet potatoes, rice, bags of chips and sugar cereal, pecans, flour, and pebbles of grain milled from the sorghum fields that separated the Chestnuts from their nearest neighbor. In a compact fridge that burdened the solar panels, the family kept milk and butter and cans of old Coke.

By the front door, a statue from the days of Benjamin’s childhood kept vigil. It was the Virgin of Guadalupe, cast in ceramic, her hands pressed against each other, her head lowered in prayer. A beaded bouquet of yellow tickseed and white water lilies lay at her feet, alongside a melted, magnolia-scented candle. When the flowers died and hardened the children were sent out to the fields to find more.

Sarat skipped past the statue, looking for her sister. She found her in the back of the house, standing on her parents’ bed, inspecting with steel concentration her reflection in the oval vanity mirror. She had taken one of her mother’s house dresses, a simple sleeveless tunic whose violet color held despite countless washings. The little girl wore the top half of the dress, which covered the entirety of her frame; the rest of the garment slid limply off the bed and onto the floor. She had applied, far too generously, her mother’s cherry red lipstick—the jewel of the simple makeup set her mother owned but rarely used. Despite employing utmost delicacy, Dana could not keep within the lines of her small pink lips, and looked now as though she’d hastily eaten a strawberry pie.

“Come play with me,” Sarat said, confounded by what her twin was doing.

Dana turned to her sister, annoyed. “I’m busy,” she said.

“But I’m bored.”

“I’m being a lady!”

Dana returned to her mirror, trying to wipe some of the lipstick with the back of her hand.

“Mama says we have to go have breakfast with Daddy now.”

“OK, oh-kay,” Dana said. “Not a moment peace in this house,” she added, misquoting a thing she’d heard her mother say on occasion.

Sarat was the second-born girl, five and a half minutes behind her sister. And although she’d been told by her parents that both she and Dana were made of the same flesh, Dana was her father’s girl, with his easygoing wit and sincere smile. Sarat was made of her mother: stubborn, hard, undaunted by calamity. They were twins but they were not alike. Sarat often heard her mother use the word tomboy to describe her. God gave me two children at once, she said, but only girl enough for one.



FOR A FEW MINUTES, after Dana had left, Sarat remained in her parents’ room. She observed with some confusion the thing her sister had smeared all over her lips. Unlike the river and the bush and the beasts and birds of the natural world, the lipstick did not interest her; it held no promise of adventure. She knew it only as a prop in her twin sister’s ongoing obsession with adulthood. Why Dana wished so desperately to join the ranks of the fully grown, Sarat could not understand.

Dana emerged from the house, still draped in her mother’s clothes.

“Didn’t I tell you not to go opening my dresser?” Martina said.

“Sorry, Mama.”

“Don’t sorry me—and pull it up, you’re dragging dirt everywhere.” Martina pulled the dress off her daughter. “I send your sister in to get you, and now you’re out here looking like a mess, and she’s inside probably doing the same.”

“She can’t put makeup on,” said Dana. “She’s ugly.”

Martina knelt down and grabbed her daughter by the shoulders. “Don’t ever say that, you hear me? Don’t ever call her ugly, don’t ever say a bad word about her. She’s your sister. She’s a beautiful girl.”

Dana lowered her head and pouted. Martina cupped her jaw and lifted her head back up.

“Listen to me,” she said. “You go back inside and you tell her. You tell her she’s a beautiful girl.”

Dana stomped back inside the house. She found her sister putting her mother’s lipstick back in the makeup box.

“You’re a beautiful girl,” Dana said, and stormed out of the room.

For a moment, Sarat stood dumbstruck. She was a child still and the purpose of a lie eluded her. She couldn’t yet fathom that someone would say something if they didn’t believe it. She smiled.



OUTSIDE, Martina cooked breakfast on a heavy firewood stove. On the plates and in the bowls there were hard biscuits and sorghum cereal and fried eggs and imitation pepper bacon cooked till crisp in its own fat.

In her slumping cheeks and dark-circled eyes, Martina’s thirty-nine years were plainly visible—more so than in the face of her husband, although he was five years her senior and the two of them had lived half their lives together. She was wide around her midsection but not obese, with an organic rural fitness that made her able, when it was necessary, to lift heavy loads and walk long distances. Unlike her husband, who had sneaked into the country from Mexico as a child back when the flow of migrants still moved northward, she was not an immigrant. She was born into the place she lived.