CHAPTER NINE
There was a mark where the devil left him. They came from miles to touch it, to kiss and caress the fissure in the forehead, to see the broken Miracle Boy. Sometimes they sat in silence, the only sounds coming from the kitchen, where the caretaker Karina Chowdhury hummed ancient gospels as she worked. Other times the men and women who came to see the boy prayed, and other times they too sang. And sometimes in the grip of paroxysm they cried and called him by their own children’s names. The boy let himself be their vessel. He sat unspeaking, the shivering hands upon him, serene as a cloud.
The house was built by the river, near where sunken Joy Road once met Chamberlain Ferry. There were others like it, northwest as far as Elijah Clark and southeast almost to Augusta. They were simple ranch houses of cheap wood and vinyl siding—prefabricated homes: the material brought in on barges that floated down the Savannah. Only thirty had been built since the start of the war, and in the years that followed, one had burned to the ground at the touch of lightning and another was erased when a war Bird fell from the sky, defunct but still deadly. The rest of the Charity Houses were occupied by refugees from the furthest reaches of the Southern State—winners of a dark lottery; survivors.
In the spring, when the storms were weak, the Savannah ran brown with mud. Although Augusta marked the last deepwater port along the river, often the smaller carriers went as far inland as Hartwell. They moved upriver in the shadow of the quarantine wall that sealed off South Carolina. The ships moved slowly, their cargo of grain and solar panels and smuggled weapons guarded by Mag soldiers or rebels or freelance arms.
KARINA ARRIVED in the morning, her Tik-Tok bouncing along the dirt road that led from Lincolnton to the edge of the spit where the Chestnuts lived. She arrived at the house to find its occupants still asleep.
She turned off the television and cleaned up the plates from the previous night’s dinner, then she went to the kitchen. Everything was in its place, just as she’d left it the night before. A dusting of sorghum flour lay on the island counter. Every night she sprinkled a little on the counter and memorized the shape in which it rested. And every morning she checked the landscape of the flour against her recollection, and in this way was able to deduce the passing of ghosts. She looked at the flour; none had come.
A back door and three sagging steps led from the kitchen to the sloping riverside yard. It was not a yard, in truth, but an expanse of land—seemingly unlimited in all but the river’s direction. It stretched outward from the home’s small garden through the shrubbery and into the spits and slivers of nearby woodland through which the Savannah constantly cut new avenues of egress.
There were no neighbors for miles, no spillover from the fierce fighting up in Tennessee, and no visiting townsfolk from Lincolnton or anywhere else. But for the people who came to touch Simon’s wound and pray, there were almost no visitors of any kind. The only eyes that watched this place belonged to the family that lived there, the guards manning the towers along the Carolina wall on the other side of the river, and the rebels who came by boat every week with food and supplies.
Once, during a rare moment of candor, Miss Dana told Karina that all their lives the Chestnuts had lived at the feet of rivers and walls. Always bounded, always trapped—trapped by movement, trapped by stillness.
In the yard, the morning light burrowed deep into the gray trunks of the maples. The trees were thin and sickly and shivered in the passing breeze. Every once in a while the branches would shed a blood-colored leaf, and Karina would chase after it for safekeeping. Secretly she set her collection to dry between the pages of an old Bible she hid under Simon’s bed. When the leaves were crisp and brittle she crushed them into the boy’s chamomile tea. She believed the red leaves healed, and she believed Simon was healing.
This was her job—a caretaker of the Chestnuts’ home and a caretaker for Simon Chestnut, the Miracle Boy. She was, nominally, an employee of the Free Southern State, although she could never rely on Atlanta to pay her wages on time or pay what she’d been promised. But still she did the work. She was a nurse by training and in the early and middle years of war she nursed Southern survivors.
ON THIS MORNING the river was blue and rippled white with the reflected undersides of clouds. The air was moist and smelled of earth and exhaust and the other smell, the one that came from beyond the wall. A dredging barge lumbered slowly upriver, a black tail in its wake. In the months following the storm seasons the barges moved up and down the river, altering the geography of the riverbed.
Karina slipped off her sandals and walked to the edge of the river. Here the soil was caramel and cool against the soles. She watched the sweep of the current, the vast lumbering arm. On the other side of the river a young man in a decrepit Sea-Tok was anchored near the base of the Carolina wall. He tagged the wall with red spray paint: “KAB.”
In the Augusta docks the quarantine wall was a vibrant mural, but this far inland the dull gray concrete was largely untouched. Overhead, the guards at the towers looked at the young vandal, indifferent. Had he decided to run a hook up the thirty-foot barrier and climb over into the Slow country, they probably would have let him. It was only the people trying to leave South Carolina they cared about, and whenever the rifle fire rang out in the night it was always only on one side and only for one purpose. In Lincolnton they said the ragged riverside forests here were overrun with the ghosts of near-escaped Carolinians, but in truth this was some of the safest country in all of the Red.
Karina stepped back from the riverbank. She checked on the vegetable garden. A week after she had told Miss Sarat she planned to try growing vegetables, a rebel skiff arrived with bags of thick black soil. It was rich eastern soil, and in it Karina tried growing beets and radishes and rhubarb and lettuce and southern peas. But even when she watered them dutifully and the heat and deluge did not overwhelm them, their roots refused to take hold in the foreign-born soil.
But on this morning she saw a shootlet: a single fetal sprig had broken forth from the earth. The green of it was pale, ghostly, and she knew it would not survive. But perhaps somewhere beneath, where the roots grew, it would leave behind some kind of genetic inheritance, a map marking, and perhaps the next thing she planted in that place would grow a little more.
SHE TURNED FROM the garden. She saw Cherylene shuffling slowly across the yard. For a while, when she’d first started working for the Chestnuts, Karina wondered why the weekly supplies so often included boxes of snails and crickets. Then one day she saw the turtle waddling in the garden.
Karina returned to the river. Near the banks there sat a portable desalination box. It was the size and weight of a refrigerator; the rebels had to use an old fossil tugboat to bring it upriver. It sat on a block of two-by-fours, its snout dipped into the brackish river.
Karina unfolded the butterfly panels and set them in the direction of the morning sun. Slowly they inhaled the light. The machine awoke, and soon the vacuum started to whirr. The machine began to cleanse the river water, soiled with salt far outland, where the ocean intruded on the sunken country.
On solar power the box produced two gallons of drinking water an hour, the contents dripping slowly into blue jugs. On old fossil fuel it ran twice as fast. Karina knew Miss Sarat ordered that the house run only on old prohibition fuel, but the panels did the job well enough, and whenever the young woman disappeared for weeks into the northern forest along the Tennessee line, Karina made do with the givings of the sun. Miss Dana was only equally adamant on the topic whenever her sister was home, but seemed not to care one way or another when Miss Sarat was gone. So whenever Miss Sarat returned, the house rumbled again to the sound and smell of the decrepit diesel generator. There was no use arguing about it. Miss Sarat had no interest in compromise.
A rebel skiff approached. Karina recognized the young man at the helm as Henry the Alabaman, a former Cavalier. In the last six months, the United Rebels in Atlanta had managed to bring most of the insurrectionist groups under a single banner, but some of the men still held fast to their old affiliations, and as a form of protest had taken on their states of birth as family names.
Henry steered into the muddy bank near where Karina stood and threw the anchor down.
“Morning, sweetheart,” he said.
“Good morning, Henry,” Karina replied. “You’re late again.”
“What, you having a bad day or something? It ain’t even an hour.”
Karina pulled her skirt up to her knees and stepped into the river. She sidestepped Henry and picked up a large grocery bag of supplies. The rebel followed with three more.
“Set them here,” Karina said, pointing to the ground near her vegetable garden.
“I’ll take them inside for ya, no trouble.”
“Here’s fine.”
Henry put the bags down. He returned to the boat and retrieved two locked steel boxes. He set them carefully by the bags. Then he and Karina offloaded a diesel drum from the skiff and carried it to the storm shelter by the side of the house. Karina removed the padlock and the two of them descended the stairs.
Here the Chestnuts kept the croaking generator hidden. The room, dark and dank, smelled overwhelmingly of that sweet bile, that old fossil fuel smell. The scent always jump-started ancient memories in Karina’s mind, memories from a childhood spent on the other side of the world: army jeeps refueling, well fires wild and unquenchable, wounds tended to by the light of headlamps. To her, the smell of any old-world fuel was invariably the smell of war.
They returned to the riverbank. Henry stood for a while, eying Karina. He smiled.
“So you gonna come back with me or what?” he said.
“Go on home, Henry,” said Karina.
“Just come out to Augusta for a couple days, just one time,” he pleaded. “Let me show you around the boardwalk. They know me in all those bars. You’ll have a good time, I promise.”
“How about we see how this war shakes out first,” Karina said. “I don’t want to end up going with someone from the losing side.”
“Christ, the boys were right,” Henry said. “You really are too old to have fun.”
Karina smiled. “Thanks for the groceries, Henry. I’ll make sure to tell Miss Sarat you dropped by.”
The impish grin disappeared from his face. He slunk back to the skiff and waded into the river’s middle and soon he was gone.
Karina carried the steel boxes to the edge of the yard, where a woodshop cabin stood, its doors hanging on rust-bitten hinges. The doors were held closed with a crowbar through the loops.
The cabin had been there a long time, longer than the house, longer than the trees, even—from a time well before the sea ate the coastal cities and the river ran roughshod over its old banks. The boards that formed the cabin’s exterior were of pale, knotted wood and stained with streaks of reddish brown, as though the wood itself had rusted.
Karina loosed the crowbar; the doors sagged open. She carried the steel boxes inside and set them down on a workbench, as she’d been instructed to do. But for the workbench, the cabin was empty—the shelves barren, the windows covered up with old charity blankets. Soon Miss Sarat would return, unlock the boxes and take their contents to someplace far away, and the cabin would be empty once more. Until then, Karina was instructed to leave the boxes untouched and replace the crowbar with a combination lock. Otherwise, she was never to set foot in the cabin, nor let Simon wander near there whenever she took him for his daily walks.
She knew what the contents of the boxes were. And in a vague, unspoken way, she knew what Miss Sarat was. Many people did, although none would ever talk about it. In Lincolnton the Chestnuts walked around town hallowed as saints: survivors of the massacre and champions of the Southern cause. In Atlanta, politicians wrote them letters of solidarity. In Augusta, there wasn’t a dockhand that didn’t know their names or a bar owner who’d take their money.
Karina knew. But unlike everyone else, she didn’t admire Miss Sarat or hold her in some reverent esteem. The girl was still a child—at seventeen, less than half Karina’s age. She knew from experience that there existed no soldier as efficient, as coldly unburdened by fear, as a child broken early. And she knew from the news and from townie gossip what the girls had been through. And because she knew, she understood. But that didn’t mean she had to admire it.
Karina carried the bags into the kitchen. They were full of esoteric supplies, things she couldn’t get from town: Oolong tea; shrimpshell bandages; the painkiller they called Bonesetters; anticonvulsants for Simon; caviar from the Russian Union.
Karina made breakfast. Simon would only eat his eggs scrambled and runny, without salt or butter. At noon, when his eyelids began to droop, she made him a sandwich of chocolate spread and apricot gel. He inhaled it and for a couple of hours afterward was ebullient and electric.
In these hours, after the weeping pilgrims who came to see him had been ushered away, she took him for walks through the forest. Many days, when Miss Sarat was gone to her secret places and Miss Dana was off in the docks in Augusta, it was just the two of them alone, walking hand in hand.
He delighted in the curling wakes of the barges and the crackle of dead leaves underfoot and the way the sunlight felt on the place near the back of his head where the hair no longer grew.
Sometimes he saw purple and orange flowers in the ground—strange life that grew in spite of the heat and the frequent storms. Sometimes he pointed at the flowers, and Karina, who did not know their names, would invent names for them: Bigwics, Morning Hallows, Laviolas, Southern Laviolas.
After she finished making breakfast, Karina woke Simon. Like the rest of the house, his room was barren. There was only a nightstand, a closet, and the bed he slept in. Miss Sarat had a rule about decorations in the house: there were to be none. No paintings or photographs on the wall, no flower vases in the living room, not even a welcome mat on the porch. There had once been an iron weather vane on the roof, a rooster atop a spinning arrow—the day after the Chestnuts moved in, Miss Sarat climbed up and tore it down.
The only exception to the rule was an ugly ceramic statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe, which sat on Simon’s nightstand. The statue was cracked in a million places and seemed to accumulate dust faster than any other surface in the house. But Miss Sarat ordered Karina never to touch it.
Simon woke to her smell before the rest of her entered the room—an oversweet lavender and vanilla perfume she knew he loved. He woke smiling, reaching for her. She wore the colors he liked. Warm, bright colors—reds and yellows, a sunflower print on her flowing skirt. She knelt by his bedside and instantly his hands took hers. He leaned up and kissed her on the cheek, a sloppy kiss, the spittle of sleep still wet on his lips. It was progress—a step she’d kept hidden from the twins. They knew he’d started to remember names and return greetings and they thought he’d started to dress himself, but they didn’t know he’d gained a sense of affection.
“Good morning,” she said.
“Good morning,” Simon replied, echoing her cadence, her inflection.
She helped Simon out of his pajamas and into a fresh white T-shirt and a pair of track pants that stretched around his growing waist. She took his recent weight gain and the new wheel of fat around his gut as more signs of healing. In the first few weeks following his arrival at the house, he had taken in nothing but milk and mashed apple paste. And on one ugly morning, the family discovered that he’d developed a crippling fear triggered by the smell of cooked meat. Now he was eating—picky and tedious as a toddler, but he was eating.
She guided Simon to a chair at the kitchen table. Then she went back to his room and made the bed. The bed was dressed with fine, rebel-smuggled sheets of the best Bouazizi cotton.
AT NOON the women came to see him. They arrived a few minutes early. Karina saw them from the living room window, idling at the small gate at the end of the road. She let them wait—she knew if she allowed them in just a few minutes early, soon they would start arriving to their appointments even earlier, and others would learn of it and start doing the same, until the schedule Karina worked so hard to maintain would be rendered irrelevant.
At noon exactly she walked the length of the dirt driveway and met the women. They were sweltering, packed into their Tik-Tok: the driver was a woman whose first name was Kristin but who demanded everyone call her the Widow Bentley. Her daughter, Leslie, sat beside her, and her mother, Eleanor, sat in the back.
Karina opened the gate. For a moment the Tik-Tok’s tires spun impotently in the dirt. Then the car fumbled along toward the house. Karina followed. She took her time walking back. When she got there, the Widow Bentley and her daughter were helping the widow’s mother exit the carlet. The eldest woman, Eleanor, was hollow with a cancer of the lungs, and, although her daughter and granddaughter took pains to constantly assail her with hope, she seemed resigned to the fact she was dying.
The Widow Bentley had taken to wearing black, long-sleeved blouses and black skirts since her husband died a year earlier in the botched rebel raid on East Ridge. She’d forced her mother and daughter to do the same; the clothes hung limp on the eldest woman’s wasting frame, still and slack as a waterlogged flag.
Karina hated to see the widows in black. They struck her as relics of their own making, frozen in permanent deference to reckless or foolish or simply unfortunate men who were nonetheless dead and sealed away in the earth forever.
Husbands never wore black. Husbands were never confined to that kind of passive declaration, were never compelled to sulk across the world for the remainder of their lives, walking signposts of mourning. Husbands were permitted rage, permitted wrath, permitted to avenge their loss by marching out and inflicting on others the very same carnage once inflicted upon them. It seemed to Karina further proof that wartime was the only time the world became as simple and carnivorously liberating as it must exist at all times in men’s minds. Some of the women she met never used their own names again—she knew them only as the Widow This or the Widow That—but she’d never met a Widower Anything.
She had lived more than half her life in the South and yet often she still felt like a foreigner. She was the daughter of doctors—analytic, razor-minded natives of the Bangladeshi Isles who overcame great poverty and strife and had no time or patience for sentimental things. From a young age her parents had seen the worst of war—the northward death marches in retreat from the rising seas; the Arunachal Massacre; the four failed Springs—and had dedicated themselves to alleviating that suffering wherever they found it.
Karina’s earliest memories were of field hospitals and blood-caked bedsheets, the great thundering barrel of war. She witnessed the last of the Russian Expansion, the wars of conquest at the furthest edges of the Bouazizi. She stitched her first suture at fourteen, tied her first tourniquet at fifteen. She knew war, knew it better even than these delusional, totem-grasping widows.
And what she understood—what none of the ones who came to touch Simon’s forehead understood—was that the misery of war represented the world’s only truly universal language. Its native speakers occupied different ends of the world, and the prayers they recited were not the same and the empty superstitions to which they clung so dearly were not the same—and yet they were. War broke them the same way, made them scared and angry and vengeful the same way. In times of peace and good fortune they were nothing alike, but stripped of these things they were kin. The universal slogan of war, she’d learned, was simple: If it had been you, you’d have done no different.
SHE LED THE WOMEN into the living room. “Something to drink?” she asked.
“Water,” Leslie said. The teenage girl slumped on the couch on the end furthest from where her mother and grandmother sat. She stared out the window at the moving river.
“We’re just happy to see Simon, sweetheart,” the Widow Bentley said. “You can bring him in now.”
Karina left the women and went outside to the backyard. She found Simon sitting at the muddy landing where the rebel skiffs docked, tossing broken branches into the current.
“You know I told you not to sit this close,” Karina said. He looked up at her and smiled. He had chubby, hairless cheeks and when he smiled the smile displaced them in a way that made him look awestruck.
“You got guests,” she said, helping him to his feet and brushing the wet mud from the back of his pants. “Paying guests.”
“Paying guests,” Simon said.
She led him back into the house. When he entered the living room, the Widow Bentley nearly jumped from her seat to touch him.
“Hello, Simon,” she said
“Hello, Ms. Bentley,” Karina told Simon.
“Hello, Ms. Bentley,” he mimicked.
The Widow Bentley put her hand on Simon’s face. “How are you feeling today, honey?”
“He’s doing real well,” Karina said. She knew the Widow Bentley hated it when she interjected, so she did it as much as possible.
“Karina, sweetheart, could you make Mama and I some tea?” the Widow Bentley said. “She’s had a bad throat all morning.”
Karina left the women with Simon and went to the kitchen. She set the water to boil and took a couple of bags of Mississippi Breakfast from the pantry; she had no intention of wasting the good Chinese stuff on the visitors. In the living room, the Widow Bentley continued to stroke Simon’s cheek.
“How did you sleep, honey?” she asked. “Did you sleep all right?”
“Like a baby!” Karina yelled from the kitchen.
When she returned to the living room, the women were already engaged in the ritual. The Widow Bentley, a Bible on her lap, took her mother’s hand in her own and placed her other hand on Simon’s forehead. Together the three of them resembled the centerpiece of some spasmodic faith healer’s sermon, the evil cast out, out from the soul.
Karina set the teacups on the table but the women ignored them. The Widow Bentley recited the same prayer she recited every time she came to visit, the psalms she knew by heart:
For you will command your angels concerning me to guard me in all my ways;
They will lift me up in their hands, so that I will not strike my foot against a stone…
The Widow Bentley closed her eyes as she spoke and her hands shook and her voice quivered. Her mother looked on with resigned tolerance; her daughter stared out the window at the moving river.
When they were done, the Widow Bentley wiped her eyes and, gripped by a deep, post-cathartic ennui, sought to remain as long as possible in Simon’s company. But the time she’d paid for had run out.
Karina walked the three women to their car. Before she left, the Widow Bentley paid the visitation fee: five hundred Redbacks. Karina took the money and thanked her.
“There’s one more thing,” the Widow Bentley said. “A favor we wanted to ask.”
The woman reached under the Tik-Tok’s backseat cushion and retrieved a shoebox. She opened it for Karina. Inside were rolls upon rolls of Red currency—a hundred thousand dollars, maybe more.
“We took it all out of First Southern this morning,” she said. “Bank manager put up one hell of a fight, but we said, It’s our money, you can’t hold it hostage.”
“What do you want me to do with this?” Karina asked.
“Just keep it for us, is all,” the Widow Bentley said. “Ever since what happened at Patience, things have gotten bad again. In Atlanta you got the Free Southern State and the United Rebels fighting over who’s gonna run the country, but neither of them got much control over anything no more. The fighting’s gotten real bad and everybody’s just waiting on the Blues to push south past Tennessee. Then you know there’s gonna be a run on the banks and President Kershaw’s gonna lock us out to keep the whole Mag from going broke. All we want you to do is keep it for us—just keep it where the boy is. That’s all. Don’t think we won’t pay you for it.”
The woman put the shoebox in Karina’s hands. From the corner of her eye, the helper could see the look of disdain on the widow’s daughter’s face.
“He’s just a boy, Kristin,” Karina said. “He’s not a bank. He’s doesn’t pay interest or buy stocks or anything else. He’s just a boy.”
The Widow Bentley pulled out another five-hundred-dollar bill from her wallet. “We don’t need no interest, we don’t need no stocks. We just need it to be where he is, that’s all. What watches over him is enough.”
Karina watched the women leave along the dirt road. At times she despised people like the Widow Bentley for believing so fiercely in their prayer bead gymnastics and credulous supplications. But most of all she despised them because, in the years she’d spent tending to their ranks, she’d come to believe in similar things—in superstitions: invocations meant to ward off the wrath of the Birds and the sickness of the walled Carolinians; the flight paths of ghosts through the sorghum.
When the three women were gone she went back inside the house. Simon was curled up on the couch with his knees pressed to his chest, asleep.
For a while she wondered what to do with the money. If she had any interest in honoring the widow’s wishes, she’d slip it under Simon’s bed, next to the Bible and the drying leaves. Otherwise she could hide it in the storm shelter next to the fuel drums. But in all these places, Karina worried Miss Sarat would inevitably find the money. And then she would berate Karina, in that charcoal, humorless voice of hers, about taking liberties that were not hers to take. Or, worse, she would say nothing, and one day the money would simply be gone, given as alms to the cause of glorious Southern rebellion.
As she thought it over, she saw through the kitchen window a black shadow reflected on the river. Instinctively she knelt down under the kitchen counter, waiting for the Bird to pass. She knew they rained down death at random, and that if today was the day they chose this place, she’d already be dead—and yet she ducked under the counter anyway, a survival reflex.
Minutes passed. She stood and looked out the window. The black shadow was gone from the river. She stepped outside into the yard. She knelt by her lifeless garden and dug deep into the soil. She dug past the places where fruits lay fetal in their seeds, until finally she reached the dirt below. She set the widow’s shoebox in the grave, and covered it.
IN THE TOWER the young soldier moved, slow and rhythmic, tethered to the beat of her heart. Sarat knew him better than he knew himself: a child of the North’s poor country—the son of dirt farmers, perhaps, or escapees from the torched California parchland or denizens of the ruined Dakotas, the post-prohibition fossil belt. She knew he had become a soldier not in service of God or Country, but Escape—a chance to become something other than his father, to dodge a life spent soldering the backs of solar panels or wading ankle-deep through shit in the vertical farms. Anything, anything else. And if that meant picking up a rifle and throwing on the brown-speckled camouflage, so be it. She had never spoken to the soldier, had never even seen him before this very moment. And yet she knew him down to his soul.
Sarat peered through her rifle’s eye. The soldier’s head floated in the cross-hairs, a buoy adrift.
THE FIRST WEEKS AFTER the massacre at Patience had been the darkest. The house they were given as blood money felt alien; every night the sisters slept together in a room fully lit, the windows sealed shut with boards. For the first few nights, Dana could not sleep. She lay frozen by Sarat’s side, certain that the men who’d taken their mother and brother would return to take them too. And on the fifth day, when the Free Southerners came from the hospital and brought with them a living shell of the brother both Sarat and Dana thought was dead, Dana screamed, because in a way the massacre was now unending.
It was only after the Chestnuts’ new life settled into some kind of routine that Sarat began to leave her siblings and venture into the outer world—first to Atlanta, where she petitioned the committee investigating the killings at Patience for some information about her mother’s remains, even though she knew in her heart that all that remained was ash. One by one, a smug parade of Southern dignitaries offered her their thoughts and prayers and the contact information of their assistants. They commended her on her stoicism, on how well she was handling it all.
She soon learned that to survive atrocity is to be made an honorary consul to a republic of pain. There existed unspoken protocols governing how she was expected to suffer. Total breakdown, a failure to grieve graciously, was a violation of those rules. But so was the absence of suffering, so was outright forgiveness. What she and others like her were allowed was a kind of passive bereavement, the right to pose for newspaper photographs holding framed pictures of their dead relatives in their hands, the right to march in boisterous but toothless parades, the right to call for an end to bloodshed as though bloodshed were some pest or vagrant who could be evicted or run out of town. As long as she adhered to those rules, moved within those margins, she remained worthy of grand, public sympathy.
But none of it mattered to Sarat. When the weeping widows came to see her brother and touch the wound on his forehead, she let Karina, the hired help, deal with them. When Free Southern State politicians from Atlanta drove up to present the Chestnuts with plaques and framed declarations of solidarity and to have their pictures taken with the survivors of the Camp Patience massacre, she left through the kitchen door and wandered out into the forest and stayed there until they were gone. In the few of those photos that survive today, scattered in myriad Southern State archives and the collected files of long-dead politicians, only Dana appears alongside the glad-handers from Atlanta, her smile radiant and wholly counterfeit.
In the months that followed, after Dana’s nightmares subsided and the storm of attention surrounding the Camp Patience massacre was over and the journalists and politicians moved on, Sarat turned her attention to the only thing that still mattered: revenge, the unsettled score.
For weeks at a time she went out to the forest in Talladega, where Albert Gaines kept a ramshackle cabin. There he taught her to shoot. At first he’d asked her if she preferred to make herself a weapon, to become what the Northerners called homicide bombers. It didn’t scare her to consider it, but the thought of abandoning Dana, of leaving her alone to care for what remained of their brother, was too much for her conscience to bear. Yet she wanted to kill. So Gaines pulled his ancient hunting rifle from its rack and set her to sniping soda cans on fence posts.
At first nothing he taught her stuck—not only because the weapon itself barely functioned, its sight cross-eyed, its trigger unreliable, but also because the memory of what she’d seen was still too vivid. Onto the tin cans her mind painted the faces of those Northerners that night in Patience, and at the hallucinated sight of them she was overcome by anger and a rabid desire to ruin those who’d ruined her. Rage wrapped itself around her like a tourniquet, keeping her alive even as it condemned a part of her to atrophy.
The hardest thing to learn was stillness. Even after she finally started hitting the cans and graduated to sniping rats, she struggled most with Gaines’s order that she learn to stay in place for hours at a time. Sometimes he had her sleep where she lay, the forest insects crawling over her. He said the most important part about this kind of hunting was fusing yourself to your surroundings, becoming the earth. But she wanted to move, she wanted desperately to move.
One day Joe came to the cabin. In all her time there, Sarat had never seen Gaines receive visitors, but Joe appeared as though he’d been to the cabin many times, as though it belonged as much to him as it did to Gaines.
“I have a gift for you,” he told Sarat. “Something to help you in your work.”
The rifle he gave her was a fine weapon, a QBU-20 smuggled in on the charity ships, packed into a sack of rice. What Gaines’s old gun saw wrongly it pinned with surgeon’s precision.
She learned to strip it, reassemble it, gauge its temperament. She painted little check marks in red fingernail polish on the black shoulder stock, immortalizing the times when the soul of the gun and the soul of its shooter aligned, even if all that died as a result was a helpless rat.
She named her weapon Templestowe, after the first true rebel of the Second Civil War, the girl who’d killed the crooked Union president in Jackson.
“These are the ways in which I can help,” said Joe. “In the end, it’s up to you what you do with such assistance. The guns are ours but the blood is yours.”
Finally she understood what he meant.
SARAT LAY MOTIONLESS at the flat peak of a hill, hidden in a skin of brush and reeds. Behind her the hill rolled gently down to the Georgia border, the land etched with a network of rebels’ tunnels. A mile ahead of her stood the southern wall of Halfway Branch, the largest Northern operating base on the Tennessee line, and beyond it the dusk-burned sides of the Smoky Mountains.
It had taken her the better part of a week to draw this close, shuffling slowly through the flint tunnels—listening for the footfall of passing patrols—and then the brush. She moved by night amidst the hickories. When she finally arrived at the spot atop the hill, she waited another three days, living off dry rations, burying her waste in the dirt. For three days she set her sights upon the southern gate of Halfway Branch and waited.
She put the rifle down and cast her binoculars upon the horizon. The hastily asphalted road leading to the gate sent upward a heat mirage, and in its untilted rise there were no signs of wind. She scanned the forest between her and the base, looking for the same things the soldiers in the towers looked for: unnatural shadows, straight lines, the glimmer of a shiny black nickel in the brush.
Gaines had trained her to see these things. In his cabin he laid out a table of items—books, cutlery, a flywheel, a packet of cards fanned out. Every time the items were different and differently arranged. He covered the table with a bedsheet and brought Sarat into the room. He uncovered the table for ten seconds and covered it again. Then he asked her to describe everything under the table to the most granular detail: the order of the fanned cards, the number of holes on the flywheel.
The sun set behind the mountains. Halfway Branch lay seared in the dying light, a box fortress of shipping containers and long-drawn tents. The soldiers milled about in their guard towers.
Sarat lay still. There was a residual dampness in her pants from when she’d urinated without moving, and now that dampness cooled and hardened. She felt it in the hairs of her legs, down to where her bare ankles rubbed against the earth.
Four soldiers ascended the guard tower. She recognized two of them as muscle, bodyguards watching over the third man. He was older than the others, his hair silver and smoothly parted. He wore the same uniform as the men who surrounded him but he was not of them; there was a calmness in the way he carried himself, the way he nodded as the fourth man and the guard tower grunt pointed out markers on the horizon.
Sarat knew the soldiers were pointing to the places from where the martyrs came—men and women who walked out from among the black gum trees with the makings of hellfire strapped to their chests. Rarely did they get to within a hundred feet of the gates before they were shot down. And when they came with rocket launchers on their shoulders, the Blues had turrets that gauged the trajectory of those rockets in midair—before the projectiles landed, the ones who’d fired them were already dead. The rebels knew these things, knew the futility of their assaults, and yet every few days another walking weapon emerged from among the black gum trees.
Sarat took Templestowe’s eye off the young soldier in the tower. She set it on the old man. He had about him an aura of distance, of remove. He was smaller than the men who surrounded him; compact, his fatigues unblemished. She saw the dusk light gleam off four stars on his shoulder. Her informant had been right. It was a general from Columbus.
The officer’s head came under Templestowe’s eye. Sarat breathed in deep. She eased her chest off the ground; she was still. In a moment Sarat and her black-mouthed girl were aligned. At a pull of the finger, Templestowe let loose a muffled sigh, and before the reeds by her lips had stopped their shaking, Sarat knew.
Excerpted from: ONE SHOT AT HALFWAY BRANCH: THE LIFE AND DEATH OF GENERAL JOSEPH WEILAND
They laid the General’s body to rest on a Sunday, and all of Columbus came out to see it. Thousands lined the sidewalks as the funeral procession crept slowly up Daniel Ki Drive, past the Executive Building, toward Trinity Episcopal Church. The flags atop the federal government offices—not only in the capital, but across the wartime North—slumped halfway down their staffs.
From the hearse emerged a fine casket of straight grain and dark cherry hue—no one in the crowd could recall the last time they’d seen such fine mahogany. The pallbearers took their places, a representative from each branch of the United States military, and the President of the United States. Inside the church, Senator Joseph Weiland Jr. delivered the eulogy, speaking before an audience composed of every Union governor and federal lawmaker in the country, as well as countless foreign dignitaries from almost every one of the North’s wartime allies.
In the early afternoon the gray, impenetrable rain clouds, long a fixture of Ohio autumns, momentarily lifted. The October sun cast a warm amber light on the cemetery grounds. A phalanx of Marines, stiff as granite columns in their Blues, stood watch, and it is said that when the ceremonial guns shattered the air, not a single one of them flinched.
The assassination of General Joseph Weiland at Halfway Branch marked in many ways the central turning point of the Second Civil War. Shot dead by an unknown insurrectionist sniper, he was the highest-ranking military casualty of the conflict.
But if General Weiland’s killing marked a temporary victory for the South’s insurrectionist rebels, it also set in motion the eventual demise of the Southern state. Popular opinion throughout the North, which for years favored compromise and reunion over an extended fratricide, seemed to harden overnight. From Pittsburgh to Cascadia came calls for vengeance. And in Columbus, the Union government listened.
By January of the following year, Joseph Weiland Jr.—only a few years removed from a low-level position in the Compensation Claims office, and a sitting Senator for less than a year at the time of his father’s death—would assume Directorship of the War Office. Under his leadership, the rate of Northern military incursions south of the Tennessee line soared. In the year following the killing at Halfway Branch, more than 250 rebel fighters were captured throughout the South. And while many were ultimately found to have played only a minor part in the conflict and were eventually released, the surge nonetheless helped pave the way for the eventual eradication of the rebel menace.