American War(42)

Sarat sat at the table and took a bite. Instantly the sweetness set off fireworks on her tongue. She moved the honey against the roof of her mouth and found the quieter undercurrents beneath the sugar: a slight hint of coffee, an earthiness, something faintly metallic and damp. Somewhere in the caverns of her mind awoke memories of the place where she was born: the mud banks, the hot tin box, the mouth of the Mississippi. Like a stranger to herself, she was surprised to discover she’d started softly crying.

“We forget, sometimes,” Gaines said, “that there are still beautiful things.”

He asked her where she was from.

“I was born in St. James, Louisiana,” Sarat said.

“I have always loved Louisiana,” Gaines replied. He pointed at the old map on the wall. “Do you want to know what your home state once looked like?”

Sarat nodded. She had seen it before, seen the tentacles of marsh and swamp and the boot-shaped expanse of land they’d once formed. But she wanted him to show her. She followed him to the map. He pointed to the place where Louisiana’s shattered hourglass figure brushed against the western edge of Mississippi.

“You see here, where the river meets the Gulf? That used to be land. Beautiful land. And here, near where the eastern shore is now, there used to be the loveliest city in all of America.”

The girl observed the map. On the newer one on the wall beside it, the place where the man pointed was a uniform blue.

“Where were you born?” she asked him.

“I was born in a place called Rome,” Gaines said.

“Where’s that?”

“Well, the famous one was in a place called Italy, but the one I came from is in New York.”

Sarat watched the man’s eyes for signs of a lie, but there were none. She realized then that, save for the dwindling number of journalists who showed up at the camp every now and then and who always made great effort to appear geographically neutral, she’d never met a Northerner before.

“You’re a Blue,” she said.

“I didn’t say that,” he replied. “You asked me where I was born, and I told you. Had you asked me where I call home, I would have told you something different.”

“What are you, then?” she asked.

Gaines sat at the table. “Well,” he said, “when I was young, I was a soldier. This was back when there was no Red and no Blue, just the one military of the United States of America. Then when I was through being a soldier, I studied to become a doctor, and for a while I worked as a plastic surgeon. Do you know what plastic surgery is?”

“You made people look pretty.”

Gaines laughed. “I suppose I did, in a way. I spent most of my time helping people who had been very badly burned. I specialized in repairing damaged skin.”

“You still do that now?”

“I still practice medicine, you could say. I volunteer at the field hospitals along the Tennessee line; I worked for a while near your old home in Louisiana, out by the oil fields.”

“You help rebels.”

“I help Southerners.”

“It doesn’t matter to me,” Sarat said. “My brother’s just about set to join the Virginia Cavaliers. He thinks he’s keeping it a big secret, but I know all about it.”

“Then for his safety you shouldn’t go around telling everyone, should you?”

“I didn’t tell everyone. I told you.”

Gaines smiled. “You know, before I practiced medicine, I wanted to become a mathematician. I was obsessed with very large numbers, and the way you can use them to tell secrets. But my father was a doctor, and he wanted me to study medicine. He used to say the only truly stable profession is blood work—the work of the surgeon, the soldier, the butcher. He said all industries rise and fall but as long as there’s even a single man still alive, there will always be use for blood work. And I suppose he was right.”

“So what are you doing in Patience, then?” asked Sarat. “I’ve seen the man they bring here once a week to hand out pills; you ain’t the camp doctor.”

“No, I don’t come here to hand out pills. What I come here to do—what you could say these days is my chief occupation—is something I don’t talk about with most people. But since I’ve taken a liking to you, Sarat, and since you were so kind to make that delivery on my behalf, and since you shared the secret of your brother’s affiliation with me, I think it’s only fair that I, in turn, share a secret with you. Isn’t that right?”

“That’s right,” Sarat said instinctively.

“What I do is travel around the Southern State—sometimes to camps like this, or towns along the border where the Blues and their Birds have caused terrible carnage, and I look for special people.”

“Special how?” asked Sarat.

“Well, courageous, I suppose,” said Gaines. “But courage isn’t enough. How do I say it? Let me ask you something. Do you ever see people in this camp who’ve been hurt by the Northerners, who’ve lost their limbs or their sight or a family member?”

“Hell, most people here are like that,” said Sarat.

“That’s right. And doesn’t it make you angry to know that the ones who did that to your people got away with it?”