American War(62)

A back door and three sagging steps led from the kitchen to the sloping riverside yard. It was not a yard, in truth, but an expanse of land—seemingly unlimited in all but the river’s direction. It stretched outward from the home’s small garden through the shrubbery and into the spits and slivers of nearby woodland through which the Savannah constantly cut new avenues of egress.

There were no neighbors for miles, no spillover from the fierce fighting up in Tennessee, and no visiting townsfolk from Lincolnton or anywhere else. But for the people who came to touch Simon’s wound and pray, there were almost no visitors of any kind. The only eyes that watched this place belonged to the family that lived there, the guards manning the towers along the Carolina wall on the other side of the river, and the rebels who came by boat every week with food and supplies.

Once, during a rare moment of candor, Miss Dana told Karina that all their lives the Chestnuts had lived at the feet of rivers and walls. Always bounded, always trapped—trapped by movement, trapped by stillness.

In the yard, the morning light burrowed deep into the gray trunks of the maples. The trees were thin and sickly and shivered in the passing breeze. Every once in a while the branches would shed a blood-colored leaf, and Karina would chase after it for safekeeping. Secretly she set her collection to dry between the pages of an old Bible she hid under Simon’s bed. When the leaves were crisp and brittle she crushed them into the boy’s chamomile tea. She believed the red leaves healed, and she believed Simon was healing.

This was her job—a caretaker of the Chestnuts’ home and a caretaker for Simon Chestnut, the Miracle Boy. She was, nominally, an employee of the Free Southern State, although she could never rely on Atlanta to pay her wages on time or pay what she’d been promised. But still she did the work. She was a nurse by training and in the early and middle years of war she nursed Southern survivors.



ON THIS MORNING the river was blue and rippled white with the reflected undersides of clouds. The air was moist and smelled of earth and exhaust and the other smell, the one that came from beyond the wall. A dredging barge lumbered slowly upriver, a black tail in its wake. In the months following the storm seasons the barges moved up and down the river, altering the geography of the riverbed.

Karina slipped off her sandals and walked to the edge of the river. Here the soil was caramel and cool against the soles. She watched the sweep of the current, the vast lumbering arm. On the other side of the river a young man in a decrepit Sea-Tok was anchored near the base of the Carolina wall. He tagged the wall with red spray paint: “KAB.”

In the Augusta docks the quarantine wall was a vibrant mural, but this far inland the dull gray concrete was largely untouched. Overhead, the guards at the towers looked at the young vandal, indifferent. Had he decided to run a hook up the thirty-foot barrier and climb over into the Slow country, they probably would have let him. It was only the people trying to leave South Carolina they cared about, and whenever the rifle fire rang out in the night it was always only on one side and only for one purpose. In Lincolnton they said the ragged riverside forests here were overrun with the ghosts of near-escaped Carolinians, but in truth this was some of the safest country in all of the Red.

Karina stepped back from the riverbank. She checked on the vegetable garden. A week after she had told Miss Sarat she planned to try growing vegetables, a rebel skiff arrived with bags of thick black soil. It was rich eastern soil, and in it Karina tried growing beets and radishes and rhubarb and lettuce and southern peas. But even when she watered them dutifully and the heat and deluge did not overwhelm them, their roots refused to take hold in the foreign-born soil.

But on this morning she saw a shootlet: a single fetal sprig had broken forth from the earth. The green of it was pale, ghostly, and she knew it would not survive. But perhaps somewhere beneath, where the roots grew, it would leave behind some kind of genetic inheritance, a map marking, and perhaps the next thing she planted in that place would grow a little more.



SHE TURNED FROM the garden. She saw Cherylene shuffling slowly across the yard. For a while, when she’d first started working for the Chestnuts, Karina wondered why the weekly supplies so often included boxes of snails and crickets. Then one day she saw the turtle waddling in the garden.

Karina returned to the river. Near the banks there sat a portable desalination box. It was the size and weight of a refrigerator; the rebels had to use an old fossil tugboat to bring it upriver. It sat on a block of two-by-fours, its snout dipped into the brackish river.

Karina unfolded the butterfly panels and set them in the direction of the morning sun. Slowly they inhaled the light. The machine awoke, and soon the vacuum started to whirr. The machine began to cleanse the river water, soiled with salt far outland, where the ocean intruded on the sunken country.

On solar power the box produced two gallons of drinking water an hour, the contents dripping slowly into blue jugs. On old fossil fuel it ran twice as fast. Karina knew Miss Sarat ordered that the house run only on old prohibition fuel, but the panels did the job well enough, and whenever the young woman disappeared for weeks into the northern forest along the Tennessee line, Karina made do with the givings of the sun. Miss Dana was only equally adamant on the topic whenever her sister was home, but seemed not to care one way or another when Miss Sarat was gone. So whenever Miss Sarat returned, the house rumbled again to the sound and smell of the decrepit diesel generator. There was no use arguing about it. Miss Sarat had no interest in compromise.