American War(97)

Whenever I brought her meals to the shed and set them on the ground outside, I peeked in through the doors. I always saw her hunched over a table made of a plywood sheet on stacked paint-can legs. The shed was littered with cheap paper diaries you could only still get from the last dead-tree store in Lincolnton. She was writing in the old way.

My mother said if she didn’t want to be part of this family, it was best to just ignore her. But I couldn’t. Whenever the old widows came by with toys for me, I made sure to play with them out in the backyard from a spot where I could see through the ajar shed doors. But nothing enticed her to notice me.

She seemed to exist in her own wild space, unshackled from the rules and decorum of life as my parents had made me know it. It amazed me to think that she slept on soil and ate where she stood and had been on a trip to some secret place for seven whole years. My sheltered world shook with the realization that it was possible to live this way. I’d been raised in the shadow of walls; she was of the river.

We had fewer guests in the months after she arrived. The politicians who visited from Lincolnton and Atlanta stopped coming. But the old widows still came by every week like clockwork. Some of them wanted to see her, but she would never come to the house.

Sometimes, playing in the paths between the greenhouses, I’d hear the laborers gossiping about her in their strange far-south drawl. They called her a Bluenose and a Pocketmouth and I had no idea what those things meant. But the words sounded exotic, faraway, primed with the stuff of adventure.



LATE THAT WINTER a new visitor came. Through my bedroom window I saw his small motorcade—three busted sedans, the old kind that ran on illegal fuel—at the far gate of the driveway. When I came downstairs I heard my mother say we shouldn’t let a man like that anywhere near our home, that we should tell him to turn right around and go back wherever he came from, but my father said that would make us bad hosts.

The cars came up the driveway to the house. The sound of their old gurgling engines drew our guest out of her shed. From the cars emerged a somber-faced entourage of young men and women, all of whom orbited their boss, Adam Bragg Jr.

With the war coming to an end and reunion finally in sight, this was all that was left of the United Rebels.

“Simon Chestnut, you living saint,” Bragg said. “The only man in the whole of the goddamn Red who deserves his good fortune.”

“Hello,” my father said, uncertain.

“What, don’t you remember me? Remember you came down to see my father that time, got you a nice piece of change from the Martyrs’ Fund?”

“What do you want, Adam?” my mother said.

But the man ignored her when he saw the big broad shape approaching from the woodshed.

“My God, Sarat,” he said. “It does the soul good to see you free.”

“I got nothing to say to you,” she told him. “Go on, leave.”

“I don’t begrudge you that,” Bragg replied. “Hell, I don’t begrudge you anything, with what you’ve been through. All I ask is a few minutes of your time. Is there somewhere we can go and speak?”

“Say what you have to say.”

Bragg looked at my parents. “Can we speak in private?”

“Go on inside,” my aunt told my parents. “They’ll be gone in a minute.”

My father took me into the house, where my mother stood by the window of the grand room, watching.

Bragg took in the property. It was noon and the sunlight turned the greenhouses radiant. A few laborers toiled on the far edge of our farm; otherwise it was quiet.

“You know you’re eating the same lettuce and potatoes the governor’s eating?” Bragg said. “Your brother’s done real well, Sarat. You should be proud.”

“What do you want.”

“Did they tell you how the great Chestnut Estate came to be, by the way?” Bragg asked. “You’ll get a kick out of this. Turns out all those people who thought your brother was watched over by God, well they wanted God to watch over their money too. So they took it out of the banks and started keeping it here. And then the night the Blues came for you, everybody assumed they’d turn the house inside out and take all the money. But when they didn’t, when they just took you and left, that’s when people really started buying the notion that God watched over the Chestnuts’ place. Pretty soon your sister-in-law over there was running a bank damn near as big as First Southern. And that’s not even counting all those people who just sent money, donated it, didn’t want a single thing in return.”

He laughed. “You know, you should march right into that big old house and ask them for your cut,” he said. “God knows you’ve earned it.”

“I asked you what you want.”

“I wanted, first and foremost, to see you,” Bragg said. “When they told me you were getting out, I didn’t believe it. I guess the war really must be ending, if they’re clearing out Sugarloaf.”

He pointed to the young men and women standing near the cars. “See that right there? What you’re looking at is all that remains of the great Southern rebellion,” he said. “All those ones who used to fight on the Tennessee line and in East Texas since the war first started have traded their swords for stump speeches—spending their time in Atlanta now, running election campaigns and talking about ‘peace with dignity.’?”