American War(93)

A few days later they returned and took her again. But this time it was not to one of the Visitation buildings, but to the airstrip. There she was made to board a small plane alongside a group of fourteen women. The women looked haggard and disoriented in the glare of the early morning sun, and said nothing to one another as they boarded the plane.

Soon they were flying. From her small porthole window, Sarat peered out at the vast expanse of glittering blue surrounding the place that had been her prison. Her eyes badly damaged, she had trouble making out the geography over which the small plane flew. But she knew exactly what it was: the lapping Florida Sea, its bed thick with carpets of sea grass and schools of blind lionfish. It was real even though she could not see it clearly, and would remain real even if every last pair of eyes in the world went blind.

The plane crossed the sea and descended upon the mainland. Sarat was coming home.





Excerpted from:

FOUND CAUSE: DIARY OF A FORMER SOUTHERN RECRUITER


Some of the other ones would try all kinds of silliness. I knew one who would take them out to the middle of nowhere in the dead of the night and have them lie in open graves. He’d tell them, “This is where you’re going to end up, trapped forever in a black hole in the ground, unless you fight for the cause of your people. The Lord takes good care of those who fight for the cause of their people.” And that sort of thing was just fine if you were trying to get some burnout from the southern coast to put on a farmer’s suit, but a lot of the smarter ones saw right through it.

What I found worked best was a lie slipped in with the truth. What I’d do is tell them about all sorts of terrible things the Blues had done—show them pictures of the victims from the firebombing of Burleson, the massacre at Patience, things like that. But along with those things, I’d tell them about the slaughter at Pleasant Ridge. Now the funny thing is, not once, in all my years working for the rebel South, did any recruit bother to find out if there had ever been a slaughter at Pleasant Ridge. They just assumed it to be true. The Blues had done so much to our people, why couldn’t they have done that too? After a while, even I couldn’t remember if there had been a slaughter at Pleasant Ridge.

That’s what made it so easy to lie later on too, when the Blue surge came and they rounded us all up for interrogation. They wanted names and crimes and we gave them both in droves. One guy I knew just listed off everyone who worked on his old block. A week later the incursion force went and rounded up a bunch of accountants and butchers and grocery store clerks.

Eventually, it got to be that the Blues had so much unreliable information on their hands, they had to let all those people go. But it was like a snake eating its own tail—by the time they got around to emptying those detention camps, they’d already turned most of the people there into exactly what they’d needed them to be in the first place. I always said the camps at Sugarloaf were the best recruiters the South ever had.





IV


January, 2095

Lincolnton, Georgia





CHAPTER THIRTEEN


I remember the day I first met her, the day she invaded my life.

There was an iron gate that bordered our property, its entrance at the crossroads where the road met the winding driveway that led to the house. My mother had the gate built after she found out she was pregnant. She also paid the contractors to add another foot of concrete to the seawall. She even had them put in a smaller picket fence around the house itself, a moat that split us from the greenhouses and the rest of the property. My father said it was overkill; babies aren’t made of glass. But my mother, who had once given up hope of ever having a child of her own, insisted. My father said some nights she used to stay up till sunrise, imagining all the ways that fate and the devil conspired to take her only child.

The two arms of the gate were decorated with twisting, curling bars that, when the gate closed and the two arms met, formed a metal outline of a pineapple. Near the entrance stood an old-fashioned mailbox, an antique from the days of government mail. A decorative wooden plaque atop the mailbox read: “Karina and Simon Chestnut.”

Once, when my father was in his clouded place, he forgot to hit the clicker as the car approached the gate, and accidentally drove right into it. There wasn’t much damage—he never drove very fast—and none of us were hurt, but my mother asked him not to take the car out again after that. Most days he was fine, and in regular conversation you’d never be able to guess the damage that had been done to him. But my mother said you just couldn’t tell when the clouds would come over him and he’d retract from the world. Even a pristine mind can fog over, let alone one hurt that way. You just couldn’t tell.

There was a buzzer in the grand room downstairs that went off whenever the gate opened. My mother, sick of the sharp sound it made, had recently ordered it altered to emit a prettier ring, two soft chimes followed by a faint rustling, like the sound of leaves in a breeze. On the night the stranger arrived, I heard the chimes; I climbed out of bed and ran downstairs.

My father was standing on the front steps. At the foot of our home, the driveway ended in a circle around my mother’s rose garden. The roses were a pale pink. It was said by many a visitor that no such flower grew anywhere else in the South; the magic that encircled the Chestnuts’ place sustained them.

I stood near my father and watched the car approach. It was the middle of winter. I was six years old. I still remember.