American War(8)

The ships came from the newborn superpowers: China and the Bouazizi Empire, the latter of which, only a few decades earlier, was nothing more than a collection of failed and failing nations spread across the Middle East and North Africa. But that was before the Fifth Spring revolution finally toppled the old regimes. Now in place of those old broken states was a single entity stretching from the Gibraltar Pass in the state of Morocco all the way to the edges of the Black and Caspian Seas.



AT DUSK, when the heat died down, Eliza Polk came over for dinner. She lived a mile north along the riverbank and through the grain field, and was the Chestnuts’ closest neighbor. The summer previous she had lost her husband and both teenage sons in one of the battles in East Texas. On account of her fevered, months-long mourning and her refusal to wear anything but plain black dresses every day since, the Chestnut children called her Santa Muerte behind her back. It was a phrase they picked up from their father.

She was forty-eight years old but looked a decade older, made so by her stooped posture and the brittle shiver of her voice. In the year since her family’s obliteration in the battlefields of East Texas, she lived simply on a widow’s pension from one of the rebel groups. In addition to her pension, she received assistance in other ways. Every few weeks, a Mississippi Sovereigns’ boat could be seen coming across the river. Upon arrival, two or three unsmiling young men would go about trimming the yard and cleaning the house and providing the diminutive widow more food and clothing than she could ever eat or wear. Polk handed much of the excess provisions over to the Chestnuts—her part of an unspoken agreement that the family, in return, provide the lonely woman some company to pass the hot, interminable days.

When she arrived Polk hugged her neighbor tightly and asked if she’d heard from her husband. Martina said she had not.

“He’s safe, honey, don’t you worry,” Polk said. “The Lord watches over him, I know it in my heart.”

Polk brought with her a mud pie. She set it on the porch railing. She stepped around the house and said hello to Simon, who was perched on the amputated ladder, struggling to hoist himself onto the roof, prohibited by pride from asking his mother for help. She sat down on one of the hickory chairs and wiped the sweat away from her forehead and called for the twins. Dana, who was busy playing house, did not emerge, but Sarat did.

“Well hello, darling, don’t you look pretty today,” Polk said, kissing Sarat on the cheek and trying, as she often did, to slick back her fuzzy, upturned hair.

“Hi, Santa,” Sarat said. As always, the woman assumed she’d earned this nickname as a result of all the gifts she’d given the family.

When she was finished hanging the laundry, Martina walked to the porch and sat beside her guest. The two women sipped on sweet tea and as the daylight faded they watched the children play.

At the riverbank, Simon kept a simple raft tethered to a stump. The raft was made of a plywood sheet on empty oil drums, and in its center stood a crucifix mast of sanded branches on which was draped a bedsheet sail. Even in the best of winds the sail did nothing, but was decorated in black marker with a crude Jolly Roger, and was kept in place to strike fear into the hearts of passing craft, or so Simon hoped.

When the water was calm, Simon was allowed to take the raft on his own as far as the midpoint of the river, rowing madly with a scoop shovel. But if the girls were with him, he had to stay close to the shore. And at all times, he had to keep the boat tethered.

“I’m sure the boys are fine, Martina,” Polk said again. “You know how those government offices are, probably told them it’d take a day or two to get the paperwork sorted. They’re probably staying overnight so they don’t have to go upriver a second time. Probably having the time of their lives at the Home and Away, I bet.”

Martina shook her head. “He’d come home. If there were three hours to kill he’d come home.”

Polk sipped her tea and retreated into the past, where she spent most of her mind’s days. “You know, when the rebels sent news about Henry and the boys, I told them to bury me with them. Bury me in the same grave because I can’t go on alone. Life’s not worth living alone.

“But you know when I saw them, just before they lay them down in the martyrs’ grave out by the Mexican border with the rest of those brave men, they looked as calm and clean as I’d ever seen them. Even the bullet wounds weren’t like you see in the pictures, all a mess like that—they were just little holes. You’d see them and think, how could something so little end a life? I was so scared before I saw them, I thought that they’d look bad, ruined. But they didn’t, they didn’t at all. They looked peaceful. Martina, they looked happy.”

“I thought you said my husband’s going to be fine,” Martina said.

“Of course, honey, of course he will be,” Polk said. She paused for a moment and then continued, softly, “But all I’m saying is, if—God forbid—if something were to have happened, if the Blues were to have done something to him, there would be no shame in it. We’d remember him as a proud Southern patriot, no different than my boys.”

Martina tossed the last of the sweet tea from her glass on the dirt. “We ain’t patriots of the South or anyplace else. We were trying…we are trying to get out. We’re going to the North. We ain’t patriots and we ain’t got any martyrs.”