American War(78)

“This is my last year in this place,” she said. “Come January, I’m gone.”

“And where exactly you gonna go to?” asked Sarat, her back still turned.

“South to Valdosta, where my mother grew up. All her people are still there.”

Sarat chuckled. “Everybody trying to get the hell out the south coast, and you’re going back?”

“Better there than here,” said the girl. “I’m not gonna wait on drunk river rats and clean up puke for the rest of my life. Wake up one day find out now I’m the Old Layla. At least down there I don’t have to worry every day about whether this’ll be the night the Blues finally come down from Tennessee, burn the whole place to the ground.”

“Only reason Blues won’t come all the way down to Valdosta is because there’s nothing down there worth burning,” said Sarat. “What are you gonna do, work in one of the farm slums? The shirt mills?”

“Maybe I will.”

Sarat shook her head. “Christ,” she said. “You still so young.”

“Like you ain’t?”

Sarat faced her. “Turn around,” she said.

Layla complied. Sarat brushed aside her ponytail and kissed the place where Georgia’s outline lay inked upon her neck. “Run off wherever you like,” she said. “You mine tonight, though.”

“I ain’t nobody’s,” Layla replied. But she lay a while longer under the slow-turning fan.

Then she was gone, and Sarat slept. She dreamed of Patience, and of the knife coming loose from her hand too soon. In the dream the Blues bound her and took her north, to a place in the forest. They dug for her a prison well deep into the ground, a dark earthen hollow from which she could not climb. It was always the same. Every night she closed her eyes and was confined to the empty well, powerless and blind and alone.

She woke with the residue of the nightmare in her pores. For a moment she scratched at the mattress, but a warm hand patted her head, and a voice said: It’s all right, beautiful girl, it’s all right.

She let her sister’s breathing calm her, and smelled the skin of her thigh. She let the lullaby wash over her—it’s all right, beautiful girl, it’s all right, beautiful girl. But she held her own eyes closed because she knew that the voice and smell and touch of her sister were not real. They were only imagined things, concocted by her mind to cleanse the aftertaste of the nightmare. When she finally opened her eyes, her sister would not be there.



OUTSIDE, the docks rattled with the movement of commerce. All morning, the crews unloaded the boxes. By noon, when Sarat could no longer keep her eyes closed, the opposite process was under way.

Sarat walked to the window. The room was dank, despite the fan’s slow circling. Still naked, she lifted the window open and leaned out to catch a little of the Savannah breeze. The boardwalk looked old and weathered in the clear light of day. A couple of drunks lay asleep in their vomit. A freight ship blocked the view of the river but Sarat could still see, on the other bank, the great martyrs’ mural.

It was painted onto a stretch of the Carolina quarantine wall, about ten blocks long. Here the wall was covered with a collage of the South’s unjustly killed. Not an inch of concrete was visible behind a mass of drawings and photographs. Almost daily, the survivors of Northern assaults were ferried on skiffs across the river and given a chance to paste or draw their loved ones’ images on the wall.

Only the dead were allowed to grace the wall. In time, the ritual became so popular that the kids who ran the skiffs started mounting ladders to their boats to reach the topmost edges. The Red soldiers looked on from their guard towers, and no matter how close the mourners came to falling over into the Slow country of South Carolina, they did not intervene. Eventually, the center of the quarantine wall in Augusta was saturated entirely, and the mural began to spread up and downriver.

Only very special circumstances, such as the massacre at Camp Patience, allowed for the pasting of new martyrs on the old part of the mural in Augusta. But the very center of the mural, it was understood by all, was never to be touched. In that sacred place was painted a large portrait of Julia Templestowe.

A tipsy, whistling dockhand stumbled down the boardwalk, shirtless. He was a rookie, fresh off celebrating his first shift on the docks. He wore a child’s toy Viking’s hat, its plastic horns bright green. As he passed the Belle Rebelle he looked up and saw Sarat standing naked at the window. He stopped and stared, uncertain. Finally Sarat snapped forward as though to lunge at him. He flinched and fell back, nearly tumbling off the boardwalk and onto the wharf below. Sarat winked at the jolted dockhand. She closed the window.

She dressed and went downstairs. The bar was empty. She fixed herself a drink and ate the stale leftover frickles, and then she left.

The waterfront was as busy now as it was the night before, but it was a different kind of traffic. This was the busyness of work. By nightfall, when the month’s business was done and the gift ships were moving back to the Atlantic, Augusta would once again be consumed in revelry, the temporarily flush dockworkers burning through their cash. Then it would grow quieter and quieter, until by the third week of the month half the bars wouldn’t bother opening their doors at all.

She hitched a ride east to the coast on one of the trucks that ran back and forth along the Savannah highway, shuttling dockhands, foreign crew members, and packages to and from Augusta.