American War(63)

A rebel skiff approached. Karina recognized the young man at the helm as Henry the Alabaman, a former Cavalier. In the last six months, the United Rebels in Atlanta had managed to bring most of the insurrectionist groups under a single banner, but some of the men still held fast to their old affiliations, and as a form of protest had taken on their states of birth as family names.

Henry steered into the muddy bank near where Karina stood and threw the anchor down.

“Morning, sweetheart,” he said.

“Good morning, Henry,” Karina replied. “You’re late again.”

“What, you having a bad day or something? It ain’t even an hour.”

Karina pulled her skirt up to her knees and stepped into the river. She sidestepped Henry and picked up a large grocery bag of supplies. The rebel followed with three more.

“Set them here,” Karina said, pointing to the ground near her vegetable garden.

“I’ll take them inside for ya, no trouble.”

“Here’s fine.”

Henry put the bags down. He returned to the boat and retrieved two locked steel boxes. He set them carefully by the bags. Then he and Karina offloaded a diesel drum from the skiff and carried it to the storm shelter by the side of the house. Karina removed the padlock and the two of them descended the stairs.

Here the Chestnuts kept the croaking generator hidden. The room, dark and dank, smelled overwhelmingly of that sweet bile, that old fossil fuel smell. The scent always jump-started ancient memories in Karina’s mind, memories from a childhood spent on the other side of the world: army jeeps refueling, well fires wild and unquenchable, wounds tended to by the light of headlamps. To her, the smell of any old-world fuel was invariably the smell of war.

They returned to the riverbank. Henry stood for a while, eying Karina. He smiled.

“So you gonna come back with me or what?” he said.

“Go on home, Henry,” said Karina.

“Just come out to Augusta for a couple days, just one time,” he pleaded. “Let me show you around the boardwalk. They know me in all those bars. You’ll have a good time, I promise.”

“How about we see how this war shakes out first,” Karina said. “I don’t want to end up going with someone from the losing side.”

“Christ, the boys were right,” Henry said. “You really are too old to have fun.”

Karina smiled. “Thanks for the groceries, Henry. I’ll make sure to tell Miss Sarat you dropped by.”

The impish grin disappeared from his face. He slunk back to the skiff and waded into the river’s middle and soon he was gone.

Karina carried the steel boxes to the edge of the yard, where a woodshop cabin stood, its doors hanging on rust-bitten hinges. The doors were held closed with a crowbar through the loops.

The cabin had been there a long time, longer than the house, longer than the trees, even—from a time well before the sea ate the coastal cities and the river ran roughshod over its old banks. The boards that formed the cabin’s exterior were of pale, knotted wood and stained with streaks of reddish brown, as though the wood itself had rusted.

Karina loosed the crowbar; the doors sagged open. She carried the steel boxes inside and set them down on a workbench, as she’d been instructed to do. But for the workbench, the cabin was empty—the shelves barren, the windows covered up with old charity blankets. Soon Miss Sarat would return, unlock the boxes and take their contents to someplace far away, and the cabin would be empty once more. Until then, Karina was instructed to leave the boxes untouched and replace the crowbar with a combination lock. Otherwise, she was never to set foot in the cabin, nor let Simon wander near there whenever she took him for his daily walks.

She knew what the contents of the boxes were. And in a vague, unspoken way, she knew what Miss Sarat was. Many people did, although none would ever talk about it. In Lincolnton the Chestnuts walked around town hallowed as saints: survivors of the massacre and champions of the Southern cause. In Atlanta, politicians wrote them letters of solidarity. In Augusta, there wasn’t a dockhand that didn’t know their names or a bar owner who’d take their money.

Karina knew. But unlike everyone else, she didn’t admire Miss Sarat or hold her in some reverent esteem. The girl was still a child—at seventeen, less than half Karina’s age. She knew from experience that there existed no soldier as efficient, as coldly unburdened by fear, as a child broken early. And she knew from the news and from townie gossip what the girls had been through. And because she knew, she understood. But that didn’t mean she had to admire it.

Karina carried the bags into the kitchen. They were full of esoteric supplies, things she couldn’t get from town: Oolong tea; shrimpshell bandages; the painkiller they called Bonesetters; anticonvulsants for Simon; caviar from the Russian Union.

Karina made breakfast. Simon would only eat his eggs scrambled and runny, without salt or butter. At noon, when his eyelids began to droop, she made him a sandwich of chocolate spread and apricot gel. He inhaled it and for a couple of hours afterward was ebullient and electric.

In these hours, after the weeping pilgrims who came to see him had been ushered away, she took him for walks through the forest. Many days, when Miss Sarat was gone to her secret places and Miss Dana was off in the docks in Augusta, it was just the two of them alone, walking hand in hand.

He delighted in the curling wakes of the barges and the crackle of dead leaves underfoot and the way the sunlight felt on the place near the back of his head where the hair no longer grew.