American War(66)
The Widow Bentley pulled out another five-hundred-dollar bill from her wallet. “We don’t need no interest, we don’t need no stocks. We just need it to be where he is, that’s all. What watches over him is enough.”
Karina watched the women leave along the dirt road. At times she despised people like the Widow Bentley for believing so fiercely in their prayer bead gymnastics and credulous supplications. But most of all she despised them because, in the years she’d spent tending to their ranks, she’d come to believe in similar things—in superstitions: invocations meant to ward off the wrath of the Birds and the sickness of the walled Carolinians; the flight paths of ghosts through the sorghum.
When the three women were gone she went back inside the house. Simon was curled up on the couch with his knees pressed to his chest, asleep.
For a while she wondered what to do with the money. If she had any interest in honoring the widow’s wishes, she’d slip it under Simon’s bed, next to the Bible and the drying leaves. Otherwise she could hide it in the storm shelter next to the fuel drums. But in all these places, Karina worried Miss Sarat would inevitably find the money. And then she would berate Karina, in that charcoal, humorless voice of hers, about taking liberties that were not hers to take. Or, worse, she would say nothing, and one day the money would simply be gone, given as alms to the cause of glorious Southern rebellion.
As she thought it over, she saw through the kitchen window a black shadow reflected on the river. Instinctively she knelt down under the kitchen counter, waiting for the Bird to pass. She knew they rained down death at random, and that if today was the day they chose this place, she’d already be dead—and yet she ducked under the counter anyway, a survival reflex.
Minutes passed. She stood and looked out the window. The black shadow was gone from the river. She stepped outside into the yard. She knelt by her lifeless garden and dug deep into the soil. She dug past the places where fruits lay fetal in their seeds, until finally she reached the dirt below. She set the widow’s shoebox in the grave, and covered it.
IN THE TOWER the young soldier moved, slow and rhythmic, tethered to the beat of her heart. Sarat knew him better than he knew himself: a child of the North’s poor country—the son of dirt farmers, perhaps, or escapees from the torched California parchland or denizens of the ruined Dakotas, the post-prohibition fossil belt. She knew he had become a soldier not in service of God or Country, but Escape—a chance to become something other than his father, to dodge a life spent soldering the backs of solar panels or wading ankle-deep through shit in the vertical farms. Anything, anything else. And if that meant picking up a rifle and throwing on the brown-speckled camouflage, so be it. She had never spoken to the soldier, had never even seen him before this very moment. And yet she knew him down to his soul.
Sarat peered through her rifle’s eye. The soldier’s head floated in the cross-hairs, a buoy adrift.
THE FIRST WEEKS AFTER the massacre at Patience had been the darkest. The house they were given as blood money felt alien; every night the sisters slept together in a room fully lit, the windows sealed shut with boards. For the first few nights, Dana could not sleep. She lay frozen by Sarat’s side, certain that the men who’d taken their mother and brother would return to take them too. And on the fifth day, when the Free Southerners came from the hospital and brought with them a living shell of the brother both Sarat and Dana thought was dead, Dana screamed, because in a way the massacre was now unending.
It was only after the Chestnuts’ new life settled into some kind of routine that Sarat began to leave her siblings and venture into the outer world—first to Atlanta, where she petitioned the committee investigating the killings at Patience for some information about her mother’s remains, even though she knew in her heart that all that remained was ash. One by one, a smug parade of Southern dignitaries offered her their thoughts and prayers and the contact information of their assistants. They commended her on her stoicism, on how well she was handling it all.
She soon learned that to survive atrocity is to be made an honorary consul to a republic of pain. There existed unspoken protocols governing how she was expected to suffer. Total breakdown, a failure to grieve graciously, was a violation of those rules. But so was the absence of suffering, so was outright forgiveness. What she and others like her were allowed was a kind of passive bereavement, the right to pose for newspaper photographs holding framed pictures of their dead relatives in their hands, the right to march in boisterous but toothless parades, the right to call for an end to bloodshed as though bloodshed were some pest or vagrant who could be evicted or run out of town. As long as she adhered to those rules, moved within those margins, she remained worthy of grand, public sympathy.
But none of it mattered to Sarat. When the weeping widows came to see her brother and touch the wound on his forehead, she let Karina, the hired help, deal with them. When Free Southern State politicians from Atlanta drove up to present the Chestnuts with plaques and framed declarations of solidarity and to have their pictures taken with the survivors of the Camp Patience massacre, she left through the kitchen door and wandered out into the forest and stayed there until they were gone. In the few of those photos that survive today, scattered in myriad Southern State archives and the collected files of long-dead politicians, only Dana appears alongside the glad-handers from Atlanta, her smile radiant and wholly counterfeit.