American War(69)

Sarat stepped between the trees and down to the water. She walked into the river. The water felt good against her skin. The night before, when she ran from the edge of Halfway Branch, she’d tripped and stumbled through a thistle bush that left cuts all over her arms and shoulders. Now the places where her skin was broken came alive, burning like flicks of oil against a hot iron pan. But this too, in its own way, felt good.

When she had walked far enough into the river, and the ground swept down and away from her feet, Sarat undressed. She let the river take the soiled clothes. She floated weightless, naked but for Albert Gaines’s charm around her neck. The river smelled of dirt and algae but it also smelled of her: the stink of a week unwashed; a vinegar effluent that grew in the spaces under her arms and between her legs. She loved her scent, carried it like her own newborn child. Now, with her eyes wide open, she sank deep into the water and gave it to the river.

She felt the eyes of the guard in the tower, watching. There was only one tower along the quarantine wall with an unobstructed view of the Chestnuts’ property. Therein sat a young Southern State private, charged with keeping the infected Carolinians from getting out.

When the family had first moved to the Charity House, Sarat refused to sleep another night under the watch of guard towers. Finally Albert Gaines took her to meet the Free Southerner who manned the tower nearest her house. He turned out to be a hopeless little boy from the Georgia coast; a kid one year younger than Sarat who’d lied about his age to volunteer.

It didn’t take long for Sarat to understand that the boy, and all the other boys dispatched to babysit Carolina’s living dead, was both Red-blooded and harmless. And in the months that followed, as she lay flat in the forest eying him through her rifle scope, she learned something else too: the watchtower guards were blind. It was a blindness fed by boredom and fear, by having at once too much and too little to observe. Often, when Sarat lay watching, the sleepy-eyed boy in the tower looked right back at her, and didn’t see a thing.

The river took her smell. It loosened the grime caught in the hairs along her arms and along her legs. When she was very young her father told her that some of her ancestors were once buried near the banks of the Mississippi River, back when it was still corseted with levees. But eventually the river broke loose and took all the nearby houses and the farmland and even the dead in their graves. The river moves, he said, and as it moves it takes.

When she emerged from the water she found a fresh set of clothes waiting on a rock by the bank. Dana sat by the side of the woodshed.

There lay a straight razor and a small bowl of eucalyptus cream set atop a stump. Sarat sat by the river and shaved her head clean. She sat for a while watching the river move, savoring the crisp coolness of the cream against her scalp, the air against her skin. Then she stood up and dressed.

She joined her sister by the woodshed. There was almost a foot of difference in height between them, Sarat pushing six-foot-five and still, a year short of adulthood, not sure if she had another spurt in her.

She sat by her sister’s side. Dana’s hair smelled of coconuts and jasmine; it curled the way waves curl, tinting the sunlight chocolate. Sarat could already see the boys in Augusta leering.

“You should go inside and say hello,” Dana said. “Simon’s in a good mood today.”

“He saying much?” Sarat asked.

“Echoes what you tell him. But it’s not nothing.”

Sarat shook her head. “Give me a minute,” she said. “I still got lightning inside me.” She held up her right hand, which shivered like a picked string.

Dana wrapped her arm around her sister’s shoulder. Sarat leaned over and curled up like a child with her head on her sister’s lap.

“Beautiful girl,” said Dana. “I’m so glad you’re home.”

The sisters saw Karina in the garden. They watched her hang clothes out on the line by the riverbank. She pretended not to see them sitting by the woodshed. She sang as she worked: the same old hymn she always sang, playing her own choir, echoing each line—We are we are, climbing climbing.

“She’s taking good care of him,” Dana said.

“I don’t trust her,” Sarat replied.

“What’s she done?”

“Nothing she’s done, just something about her. I don’t know what she really thinks of us. What she really wants.”

“What do you care what she thinks of us?” asked Dana. “She’s just working here, nothing more.”

“She’s in our home, isn’t she? Anyway, she keeps talking to Simon and anyone else who’ll listen about how she doesn’t care who wins, North or South, just as long as there’s no more war. Like she’d be happy if the Blues marched on Atlanta tomorrow. You know her parents live up in the North? Moved there right before the war started.”

“So? Wouldn’t you, if you had no stake in it?”

“Nobody has no stake in it,” said Sarat.



NIGHT FELL. A humid film spread over the air. Sarat awoke from a fitful nap with her sister’s hand still caressing her head. She heard the sound of a motorboat engine in the distance, a rebel skiff from further inland.

“Why’d you let me sleep?” said Sarat.

“Wasn’t long,” Dana replied. “You were barely out an hour.”

As the skiff landed, the sisters went to the woodshed and retrieved the most recent shipment of locked boxes. They carried them to the waiting boat.