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The night after he won, the General picked the trophy case lock. Even at nine, he welcomed envy.

That’s when the fights first began.

In the beginning, it was just the boys themselves. But if there is one thing boys don’t know, it is noise control. Soon, their jeers and the sound of young bone against harder young bone became too much to ignore, and Father Michael came looking. Technically, they were fighting for the General’s ribbon. But Father Michael knew, the minute he walked into that musty basement thick with the pubescent smells of sweat and blood and the kind of double-edged terror-thrill that comes from a lack of safety net, that the ribbon itself had nothing to do with it. They were fighting because no one had ever loved them, or because once someone had but then they stopped, by choice or fate or finale. They were fighting because if they didn’t—if they went to bed that night without a swollen lip or a cut over their eye and had to get up again the next day to till someone else’s fields for free, for nothing but the gift of another day over—their bodies would hold none of their own stories. And since they already had no one to claim them, no one who could look at them, dead or alive, and say, Yes, him, he is mine, they had to, at such an early age, become their own, and the only way they knew how to do so was by marring themselves into recognition. To make a history on their skin.

When he stepped into that basement and saw the General with his teeth up to the gums in the calf of another boy, Father Michael recognized all of this—their need and their pain and their thirst for glory, and also what only an adult with no qualms about making a living off the backs of children could recognize: the siren’s call of unadulterated profit.

That was when the real fights began.


Four years later, when the General had decided to run away, he picked the lock to Father Michael’s office, to steal a cashbox the boys whispered about, with a key kept taped to the underside of a drawer. To the General’s utter delight, when he opened the box, underneath crumpled bills he found his purple ribbon. He took the whole thing, key and all. The money ran out quickly, and for a long time that box and its purple ribbon were the only things he owned. The only reminders—unlike the scars he had earned but Father Michael had been paid for—that he was, in fact, his own person.

And when he was thirteen, it was that ribbon that got him work at the Farm.


At the Farm, the General didn’t have to wait to live. He contributed every day, and, in return, he was a part of something real. He attended class, learning about the Bible in a radically different way than at Saint Anthony’s. Instead of the phantasmal, anemic God whose son got hard from blows to both cheeks, at the Farm, he learned about the red-blooded God, the one with fury and grip. The God who practiced envy, who encouraged possessiveness over one’s own belongings as long as all knew that ultimately everything was actually his.

It was in these classes that he learned about the Almighty War. The battle between Heaven and Hell that had been raging for so much longer than humans could comprehend. The priests at Saint Anthony’s made it sound like the events that took place in Heaven and Hell were so long ago, they seemed almost mythical. Not the places themselves—those were real and thriving. But their battles, their threats and their victories. Their losses. According to the priests, Heaven and Hell were relics of the past. Heaven and Hell were done with their war, their moment in the historical sun. They were backdrops now. But at the Farm, the General learned that the war was ever raging, and constantly in need of more forces. It was here that he also learned about the water. The river Lethe, as the texts called it. The river in Hell that would wipe a person’s memory. A tricky battle tactic, like all of Hell’s tactics. So even if the Farm sent soldiers from the surface to fight from within on behalf of Heaven, a Trojan horse approach, they would arrive in Hell and instantly forget their purpose, falling into lockstep with the other side.

The Farm was a paradise, but paradise always comes at a price. The strongest of God’s warriors, those chosen by the Holy Father or by battle, or because of size or circumstance, had to make it to the Almighty War, and they couldn’t be tempted into complacency by the trickery of Hell. They had to learn how to be strong, to resist the water and keep their wits—their decency—about them, so they could be called back to Heaven once they had fought and won.

The General was the strongest the Farm had seen yet. He could tend to a breech calf with the same calm certainty as he could to a fellow soldier’s jammed weapon under fire. From the moment he was found undernourished and exhausted at the Farm’s gate, purple ribbon pinned to his lapel, tattered and almost white from the sun, he had worked and believed so hard that he quickly became one of the Holy Father’s favorites.

That was, until the General got the first—and only—girl he ever loved pregnant.

Elsie was a year younger than him, and she kept her long fair hair in a single plait down her back. It took him two years to gather the courage to speak to her, as the boys and girls were not encouraged to engage at their age. But he always knew where in the room she was—he could feel her pulse as if it gave off waves of sound tuned just for him.

They hid it for as long as they could, but when her bump—six months large and Elsie beyond all reasonable excuses—was discovered by another girl in her bunk, Elsie was dragged into the Farm’s center by her hair. The General was at the armory at the time; he had risen through the ranks from farmer to soldier to head boy of the Holy Father’s militia. It was his job to keep the guns cleaned and the ammo accounted for. To always be prepared.