American War Page 4

  “Ma’am, until the Department of Emergency Security completes its investigation, I’m afraid…”

  “Goddamn cowards,” Martina said. “There’s not one real man among you. You just do whatever they say, don’t you? No different than trained dogs. I hope it’s your family next, I hope it’s your family next.”

  “Once the investigation is complete you’ll be able to claim the remains.”

  “Get off my land,” Martina said. She bent down and dug into the mud and threw it at the officers. It landed in wet splatters on their uniforms and their boots. She bent down again and this time the mud landed on the back of the officers’ shirts as they walked to the boat.

  As he released the rope from the mooring, the younger of the two men turned briefly to face Martina. “Sorry for your loss,” he said.

  Martina watched the boat vanish upriver, its outline glistening momentarily as it crossed the rippled crest of the moon’s reflection on the water. And then it turned the bend and was gone.

  She heard Polk saying, “He’s with the Lord now. He’s a martyr like mine.”

  “Go to the children,” Martina said. “Make sure they get to bed. I’ll be in soon.”

  “Honey, I won’t leave you.”

  “Go on now, I’ll be in soon.”

  She sent Polk back to the house and for a while she stood alone near the muddy descent to the riverbank.

  She watched the black river, endless and endlessly moving. She walked north, the earth cool and damp against her feet. Soon she was among the sorghum, the brown pods of grain bunched around their stalks, hard as ball bearings. When she was far enough from her home that she knew the children would not hear, she fell to her knees and screamed.

  Excerpted from:

  THESE THE CALLS OF OUR BLOOD: DISPATCHES FROM THE REBEL SOUTH

  The waking hours were the most unkind. She lay still in bed, the mind aflame, the body paralyzed, unable to face the day. She clutched her mother’s butterfly brooch in her hand, its faded emerald stones smooth under her fingers. The nurses let her keep it, after they ripped the pin from its back.

  This was in the days before—before Julia Templestowe became the rebel South’s first martyr, its first killer, the patron saint of its war. It is often forgotten: There’s always a before.

  The rebels recruited her with the bandages still fresh around her wrists. They found her in a bar on Farish Street across from the abandoned Alamo Theatre, its blue vertical sign missing its first and last letters. She was wearing a stranger’s throwaway dress, given to her by one of the nurses. She was drunk and alone once again with the terrible illness in her brain.

  They knew how to find the ones who were most likely to do it. They kept watchers in the hospitals, where they looked for suicide attempts, and in the schools, where they looked for outcasts, and in the churches, where they looked for hard-boiled extremists feverish with the spell of the Lord.

  From these, they forged weapons.

  On the day the President was set to come to Jackson, they drove Julia to an abandoned farmhouse ten miles south of the city, where they outfitted her for death. She was to go in the guise of a pregnant woman. Within the cavity of her false belly they packed a thick paste of fertilizer and diesel fuel, planted with seeds of iron nail. They called it a farmer’s suit. A wire ran up along her chest and back down her left arm, covered by the sleeve of her shirt, and ending at a detonator taped to her wrist.

  They’ll remember you forever, they told her. When this is over they’ll build cities in your name.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Sarat hunched by the front porch, waiting for her mother to return from Eliza Polk’s house. She’d gone there to see about a man.

  Nearby, Simon struggled to climb onto the roof of the house. Over the last three days, he’d tried a dozen times to hoist his frame over the edge. He knew that the solar panels began to weaken if they weren’t wiped down every other day, and that without regular chlorination the water from the rain tank began to smell faintly of eggs. With every passing day his inability to complete these responsibilities gnawed at him.

  Once again he set the ladder in the dirt against the side of the shipping container. Here the earth was softened by runoff from the nearby standing shower, and the legs of the ladder sank slightly into the mud.

  At Simon’s insistence, the twins braced the ladder on both sides, trying to keep it steady. Standing on the top rung, he readied to leap and hike himself onto the roof.

  “OK,” he said, wiping the midday sweat from his hands. “Ready?”

  “Ready,” Sarat and Dana replied in unison.

  Simon braced his hands against the edge of the container. On his tiptoes he peered over the top.

  “Hold it steady,” he yelled at his sisters.

  “We are,” Sarat replied.

  “No, hold it so it doesn’t move.”

  “We are!”

  Simon screwed up his courage. He thought about the ease with which his father did such labor—how, even when he came home late at night from the shirt factory, his fingers red and raw from stitching, he happily took on the chores of the house: patching a hole in the rain tank, re-boarding the windows after a freak storm, making flour of the sorghum grain with the old hand-crank mill. He recalled the sound of the crank squeaking as it pulverized the grain to fine dust—it was the sound of work.

  Simon steadied his feet on the top rung. “One, two, three!” he cried, and jumped as high as he could. With his hands still clamped on the edge of the container he rose, his chest level with the roof. For a moment he was weightless, suspended in air. He tried to pull himself over the top, but like a seesaw unevenly weighted, he leaned a little forward and then tumbled back. He landed with a fat thud, neck-first in the soft earth.

  The twins yelped and backed away from the ladder. Sarat watched her brother lie on the ground, mesmerized by the violence of his collision, the way his impact made the earth spit itself up. Dana screamed at the mud stains that suddenly covered her dress.

  Simon lay still for the better part of a minute, the wind knocked out of him. Finally he groaned and began to lift himself.

  “Never mind,” he told his sisters. “You’re holding it all wrong.”

  “Oh my God, just wait for Daddy to come do it,” Dana said. “You got mud everywhere.” She stormed into the house to change. Simon followed.

  Sarat remained outside, looking at the place where Simon had fallen. She knelt to the ground and dug with her hands a small trench in the dirt from the edge of the shower stall to the indentation Simon’s fall had made in the earth. Then she turned the tap and let the water flow from the showerhead. Slowly the runoff trickled into the trench. From there it flowed as a miniature river and filled the void of Simon’s crater, a newborn sea in the shape of a boy.

  “Turn that off,” Simon said, reemerging from the house in clean clothes. “You’re wasting water.”

  NIGHT FELL. The children ate dinner alone, their mother still at Polk’s place across the field. They ate sandwiches of stale bread and preserved pork that came in tin cans labeled in a language they could not understand—an import from the aid ships, given to them by Santa Muerte. In recent days, their neighbor had started coming over more frequently and with more gifts: food of higher quality, better clothes.

  The canned meat had the texture of soaked erasers, rubbery against the teeth. When they were finished, the children ate the last of Polk’s mud pie, its cream cheese frosting cracked and hard after two days in the refrigerator.

  Sarat watched the river. All day she had seen more boats than usual coming across from the eastern banks, and now in the darkness the traffic intensified. She heard the sound of muffled fossil motors about a mile upriver, and occasionally could even make out the voices of unseen men barking commands.

  “Is that Daddy?” Dana asked.

  “No,” Simon replied. “It’s the rebels.”

  “Who are the rebels?”

  “Fighters.” Simon looked
at his sister to see if she comprehended the word. “They’re on our side in the war against the North.”

  “Mama says Daddy’s in the North,” said Dana. “We’re gonna go see him there.”

  “Mama’s lying,” Simon said.

  Dana turned to her twin, incredulous. “He called Mama a liar!” She turned back to her brother. “I’m telling.”

  “You think Dad would just take off for the North without us?” Simon said. “He didn’t take nothing but a couple of papers with him. Didn’t even take a change of clothes. Something bad happened and Mama won’t tell us what.”

  Dana shook her head. “Mama says Daddy’s in the North,” she repeated. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  THE BOATS the children heard were rebel ships, moving soldiers and supplies to the oil fields on the western front. They docked near Eliza Polk’s house, where they set up a temporary encampment, and where Martina Chestnut came at her neighbor’s invitation to talk to a rebel commander about sanctuary.

  The Polks’ house was made of four trailer homes laid in a square. They were prefabricated blocks with vinyl siding and sloped tin roofing.

  Normally quiet, Eliza Polk’s land was chaotic with the turbulence of incoming rebels. Martina emerged from the sorghum field to find dozens of men, almost all of them teenagers, moving about the home. In a chain of passing hands they hauled wooden crates and burlap sacks from the unlit boats to the trailers. The rebels carried small portable radios that crackled with orders to prepare for the arrival of more incoming ships. By the riverfront, a boy sat flashing a standing light in sharp bursts to the vessels passing through the dark water.

  They wore tattered uniforms of no consistent color or style, composed of whatever was available to them—black jeans, cargo vests, duck hunter’s camouflage, fatigues from foreign armies smuggled aboard the aid ships at the request of the rebel leaders. Their weapons were also smuggled in, or else salvaged from the attics and basements of parents and grandparents—the guns often older than the boys who carried them. They were, to a man, untrained and ill-equipped, and ahead of them to the west lay certain death at the hands of a superior army. But behind them, in the dead-end towns where they were born, lay a slower kind of death—death at the hands of poverty and boredom and decay.

  Martina stood at the edge of the field, watching them. In the central garden, they had set up a makeshift command table. On the table lay a large contour map of the Louisiana-Texas border. A few of the older men were assembled around the table, marking the map with various pins and highlighters. Occasionally, they looked up to address the younger fighters, who went about hauling crates and erecting tents. One boy, who could not have been more than seventeen, scaled the Polks’ river-facing trailer and attempted to fly the rattlesnake flag of the United Rebels from the roof, but was ordered down by an older, more discreet superior.

  Near the trailer’s front entrance, Martina spotted Eliza Polk. She stood waiting at the front steps as a couple of rebels moved her suitcases from the home to one of the boats docked nearby.

  Polk saw Martina and called her over. As she approached the trailer, Martina could feel the eyes of the boys on her, cold and suspicious. But they said nothing.

  Polk hugged her neighbor. “Oh, honey, honey,” she said. “It all happened so fast.”

  “I thought you’d said it was just the commander coming.”

  Polk shook her head. “The Blues are moving east from the Texas oil fields,” she said. “Our boys are going out to meet them. They say if they move fast enough they can keep them from getting any further into Louisiana.”

  Martina looked around her for someone who fit the description of a field commander. “Is he here?” she asked.

  “Yes, honey. But he’s busy. He won’t talk to no one but his men.”

  “Point him out to me.”

  “Just wait a while,” Polk pleaded. “Won’t do no good to try talking to him now.”

  “Show me where he is.”

  Reluctantly, Polk guided Martina to a man at the table in the garden. He was tall and skinny, perhaps five or six years younger than Martina. He wore a neatly trimmed beard that narrowed down to the upper tip of his sternum like an arrowhead. He was dressed in black, from his boots to his military cap. Around him, many of the fighters seemed to hover in elongated orbits, rushing to various parts of the temporary encampment to fulfill his orders before returning to be given a new assignment. He spoke softly enough that, until she was standing directly opposite him at the map table, Martina could not make out a word he said.

  When he saw her, the field commander said nothing. He looked over at Polk.

  “This is my neighbor I told you about,” Polk said. “The one whose husband was martyred.”

  “He wasn’t martyred,” the man said. “He died.”

  The field commander was silent once again. The men around him seemed to regard Martina with hostility, but in his eyes there was only stillness.

  “I understand you keep a house near Vicksburg for the martyrs’ widows,” Martina said. “A safe place for the women and the children.”

  The field commander did not respond.

  “I have two little girls and a son, just babies the three of them,” Martina continued. “Their father’s dead and we got no means to support ourselves.” She turned to Polk. “Ms. Polk here’s our only neighbor, and her generosity’s kept us from starving, but she’s leaving now. All I ask is you let us go with her to Vicksburg, where no harm will come to my children. I don’t ask anything more.”

  “Can’t be done,” the field commander responded.

  “Why not? We can be packed in an hour. We can go right now, just the clothes on our back.”

  “We keep a home for the kin of martyrs,” the field commander said. “Unless you got some other man died fighting for the cause, that ain’t you.”

  He turned back to the maps on the table, and quickly around him the fighters resumed their orbit.

  “C’mon honey,” Polk said, taking Martina by the arm. “Let’s leave them be for now. We’ll sort something out, I know we can.”

  Martina pushed Polk’s hand away.

  “Your men killed my husband,” she said to the field commander. “Your men killed one of their own and they have a responsibility to do right by his family.”

  The field commander walked around the table and over to where Martina stood. Up close she could see he had beautiful green eyes. No movement in them, but beautiful.

  “My men kill Northerners and traitors,” he said. “Which of those is your husband?”

  Polk tugged at the field commander’s shirt sleeve, pleading with him to come talk to her alone inside the trailer. The two walked to the home, leaving Martina standing amidst the fighters, many of whom had stopped what they were doing to watch.

  “You got some balls talking to him that way,” one of them said. “I’ve seen him shoot men for saying less.”

  “I don’t care what you’ve seen,” Martina replied.

  In a while the field commander and Polk emerged from the trailer. The man approached Martina.

  “Tomorrow at dawn there’s a bus coming up the road along the east bank. It’s headed to Mississippi, up to Camp Patience. Because this lady here vouched for you and because of what her men gave to the cause, I’ll send word that if you and your children are there tomorrow, they’re to make room for you.”

  “You’re telling me to take my kids to a refugee camp?”

  “I’m telling you to do what suits you.”

  The field commander turned back to the maps on the table. “Go on now,” he said. “Nothing more for you here.”

  Martina looked around her at the assembled soldiers.

  “Not one of you man enough to speak up? None of you got mothers, none of you got kids?”

  The men continued to watch her, some of them cold, others snickering. None spoke.

  Martina left them where they stood and marched back the way she came. At the ed
ge of the sorghum field Polk caught up to her.

  “Oh, honey, I’m sorry,” she said. “I did the best I could.”

  “So we’re not Northerners because we’re from the South, and we’re not Southerners because we tried to move north,” Martina said. “Tell me what we are, then. Tell me what we are.”

  Polk gave a piece of paper to Martina. On it was scribbled the time and location where the bus would be the following morning. “It’s not so bad at the camp, Martina,” she said. “They got good food—food straight from the aid ships, and free too. And they got places for the children to play. You’ll be safe there.”

  “We’ll be cattle there.”

  Polk pointed west. “Honey, it’s for the good of your children. They say the fighting’s closer to us now than ever before, and moving further east every day. The traitors in the Louisiana guard are letting the Blues march right onto our land, and they don’t care who they kill. In Patience you’ll be among your own. Your children will be safe, Martina. What else matters but that?”

  Martina looked into the small steady eyes of her neighbor. “I’m staying in my home,” she said. “I’m going to claim my husband’s body and I’m going to bury him on his land and I’m going to stay in my home and if the war comes to my door then let it. I’m done waiting on the good favor of little boys with guns.”

  “I did the best I could,” Polk said. “But you shouldn’t have said what you did about his people killing one of their own. They’re very sensitive to that.”

  WHEN SHE RETURNED HOME Martina found Sarat buried up to her neck in mud by the riverbank. The girl squealed with delight as her brother piled on handfuls of the brown sludge. Dana sat on a nearby stump, watching with vague disapproval.

  When he saw his mother Simon sprung to his feet. “She asked me to,” he said.

  “Dig her out and get cleaned up,” Martina said. “And then go to bed.”