American War(43)
“I guess.”
“And don’t you wish you could do something about it?”
Sarat paused, silent.
“I suspect right now you’re thinking, What can I do? I’m stuck here in this camp that may as well be a prison. What can I do against a whole army full of grown men with guns? Maybe there’s nothing I can do, nothing at all.”
“I didn’t say that,” Sarat replied.
Gaines laughed. “Of course you didn’t, of course you didn’t! And that’s my first inkling, Sarat, that maybe you’re one of the special ones. So let me tell you what it is I do. I seek out special people—people who, if given the chance and the necessary tools, would stand up and face the enemy on behalf of those who can’t. I seek out people who would do this even if they knew for certain that it would cost them dearly, maybe even cost them their lives. And then I do everything in my power to give them the tools, to give them their chance.”
Sarat waited for him to say more, but he sat quietly watching her. She struggled to think of a reply, some means of convincing him she understood exactly what he had said, even though she did not, even though she was mystified by almost all of it. The silence grew leaden around her; she blushed.
“Ah! Never mind all that,” Gaines said suddenly. “We’ll have plenty of time for that sort of talk later. For now, what say you we listen to some music?”
“All right,” Sarat said.
Gaines stood and walked to a set of bookshelves on the other side of the room. The shelves were full of old paper books. Some were impossibly thick, others bound in leather and inscribed with delicate golden script. While his back was turned Sarat ate another spoonful of honey.
At the bottom of the middle shelf there was a small, flat contraption Sarat had never seen before, and two small speakers connected to it. Gaines ran his finger along a row of thin plastic cases lining one of the shelves. He pulled one case out and opened it. Inside was a round disk whose underside turned the light to rainbows. He pushed a button on the contraption and its top sprang open. He set the disk inside, closed the lid, and pushed a button. A faint whirring sound followed.
“Does your family still have many old things?” he asked Sarat. “Things from before the war?”
“Not really,” Sarat said. “We used to have a few of my grandparents’ things back home, photos and a wristwatch and a couple of letters, but we left most of them behind when we came here.”
“That’s a shame, isn’t it? The first thing they try to take from you is your history.”
A soft stringed lament silenced their conversation. The room filled with music.
At its heart was an instrument Sarat had only heard once or twice before. Low, earthen strings, dampened as though filtered through the bones of deathbed oaks.
“This was my grandmother’s favorite song,” Gaines said. “Listen.”
A woman’s voice emerged from behind the waning strings. It was a voice unlike anything Sarat had ever heard before, full and deep and ciphered in a language she did not understand.
“?‘Son qual stanco pellegrino,’?” Gaines said. The words meant nothing to Sarat but their phonetic echoes clung to the walls of her mind.
She listened, enchanted. And afterward, when Gaines said he would like her and him to become friends, and that he would like to teach her about music and art and many other things from the vast and varied world beyond the gates of Patience, she nodded without thinking. Gaines smiled.
“I think you’ll find a place for yourself in this world, Sarat,” he said. “I think you’ll make a place for yourself in this world.”
Excerpted from:
A NORTHERN SOLDIER’S EDUCATION IN WAR AND PEACE: THE MEMOIRS OF GENERAL JOSEPH WEILAND JR.
I was only 29 years old when President Daniel Ki was assassinated. At the time I was a Compensation Claims Officer in Columbus, working in a small department within the War Office. The war of Southern secession had only just begun.
Not coincidentally, the earliest days of the war were also some of the most prolific lawmaking and nation-building years in American history, rivaling only the years during which the capital was relocated inland from storm-ravaged Washington, D.C.
It was during those early wartime years when the federal government succeeded in passing the Clean Fission Act, restarted the Eastern and Western Seaboard Decommissioning Initiatives, laid down the first thousand miles of the Sunbelt Transit System, and greatly expanded the overfill suburbs around Pittsburgh, Indianapolis, and Lexington. War is movement, my father likes to say.
At the time, the department I worked at was located about two miles east of the Executive Building, where my father worked in an office down the hall from President Martin Henley’s briefing room. He used to call me up from time to time, usually to discuss some compensation claim I had recently approved. I remember one such meeting, early on in the war.
On my way to see him that day, I passed the Threat Map in the lobby of the Executive Building. On that morning, a portion of the southern fortification was pulsing the black-and-red color that indicated an attack had taken place. By my count it was the third such attack in three weeks. I learned later that it was another homicide bomb, aimed at the more vulnerable defenses of the capital’s outer wire. No insurrectionist has ever managed to penetrate the Blue Square itself, but it is an unfortunate reality that there have been many cowardly attacks against the outer wire, attacks that have taken the lives of many brave guards. We lost four guards that day.