American War Page 5

  “Mama, Simon called you a liar,” Dana said.

  “I did not,” Simon replied. He threw a scoop of mud in Dana’s direction.

  “I won’t tell you again,” Martina said.

  The children marched up the embankment. Sarat skipped ahead of them, slick with mud, the brackish scent of the earth latched on to her skin. She undressed as she walked, dispatching her overalls in the dirt path behind her, and stepped into the shower. Of the three children, she had the darkest skin; Dana and Simon had inherited the brown of their father, Sarat the black of her mother.

  Martina brought a change of clothes for her daughter and left them on an upturned water bucket by the stall. Soon the children had all washed and changed. One by one they kissed their mother and retreated into the house.

  Martina sat alone on the hickory chair. She ate the sandwich crusts the children had left behind, and the last wet remnants of the canned meat. Still hungry, she stepped quietly into the house and took from the refrigerator a packet of apricot-flavored gel. It was an orange-colored paste of gelatinous texture. It came in a plain silver packet and had once been part of a military ration kit. In the South such kits, sold or discarded or given away, inevitably found their way to the gray market, where they were ripped open and their parts sold off individually. It was highly prized food, not for its taste but because of its utility, the energy it provided.

  Instead of returning to the hickory chair, Martina found herself walking—not east to the river or north to the sorghum fields but west, behind the house and along the little-used paths that cut back through the brown-capped weeds to what remained of the inland town.

  In the early winter, when the weather cooled and demand for labor grew, this was the route her husband took to the factory in Donaldsonville. There was a shuttle bus that stopped close to the Chestnuts’ property, but most days he chose to walk. He followed the footpath through the weeds to where it met a country road. Two miles in, the road crossed a pair of unused railway tracks, thick bushels of grass growing between the crossties.

  Martina walked the same road toward the tracks. She moved carefully, cognizant of the deep fissures and cracks in which an ankle could easily turn. Where they still stood and their autonomous solar panels still functioned, a few roadside lights cast white halos on the ground. Otherwise the road was dark.

  Just east of where the road met the tracks there stood the ruins of a small farmhouse once owned by friends of Martina’s parents. Near the house was a cotton field, long ago gone to seed.

  Martina left the road and walked along the dirt driveway. Ahead of her, the simple wooden farmhouse stood frozen in mid-collapse. A cascade of storms coming off the Mississippi Sea had slowly pushed the walls from their moorings, but not enough to bring the structure down. Instead the home leaned visibly to the west, a teetering parallelogram.

  Every once in a while, when she needed time alone, Martina came to this place. But for the occasional beer bottle or empty cigarette pack left on the front steps by a drifter, the home never showed signs of life. At the western end of the property there stood a many-limbed pecan tree. Long ago, from its thickest branch, the family hung a tire swing. Since childhood this place was Martina’s refuge. Beyond the tree, the land was flat and the view unsoiled for what seemed to be the entirety of western Louisiana.

  But in the darkness there was nothing to be seen, the sky a uniform black. Only the Birds flew overhead—soundless warring craft designed to spy and to kill from great distance, their movement and intent once controlled by men in faraway places, who had only the grainy, pixelated footage of vaporized targets to gnaw on their conscience. Early in the war, the Birds were the Union’s most effective weapon, until a group of rebels detonated a bomb at the military server farm that kept the drones under the control of their remote pilots. Now the machines, powered by the solar panels that lined their wings, flew rogue, abandoned to the skies, their targets and trajectories random.

  She sat on the well-worn swing. The branch gave a little, letting out a faint squeak as Martina’s weight pulled the rope tight into the rut in the bark.

  She ripped open the gel packet and scooped the orange gunk into her mouth with her finger. Because of its texture the food could not be chewed with any conviction; she mashed it between her tongue and the roof of her mouth, letting it slide down her throat. It tasted not of apricot but of apricot perfume, of apricots as envisioned by engineers unfamiliar with the fruit as it existed in the natural world. In a minute she felt the sugar coursing through her nerve endings.

  She heard the sound of shuffling feet. Startled, she began to ask who was there, but stopped, frozen solid. The shuffling came closer, until it was nearly upon her. That was when she finally saw the source of the sound—an emaciated, mangy dog wandering blind through the empty field. It was a foxhound. It moved slow and reticent toward her, probing for any sign of hostility.

  Martina squeezed the last of the apricot gel onto her palm and held it out to the dog. It sniffed at the food. Though starved, the dog paused to consider the gel and then turned away.

  Martina looked up. A small orange dawn suddenly lit up the sky.

  It was a half-dome of bright light on the horizon, visible only for a few seconds. Then it was gone.

  In a moment it came again, and this time in its wake a horn of flame shot high into the night sky. It hung in the air for a few seconds, sustained, and then retreated. The sight offered no sound, each wave of illumination as though in a vacuum.

  Then came a half-sun to dwarf the previous bursts of light, and a few seconds later a roar unlike anything Martina had ever heard. The sound collided with her chest and sent her tumbling backward off the swing. She fell to the dirt, staring dumbstruck, her ears overwhelmed by a dull ringing. The foxhound yelped and fled. And then Martina too was running, back in the direction of her children and her home.

  She sprinted, summoning the legs of her youth. A quarter-mile down the road, her lungs burning, a bang even louder than the one before it shook her off her feet once more. By the time she’d reached her home, winded and bracing against the porch railing for support, two more explosions had shattered the night.

  She found her children inside the house, frantic. The twins were huddled together on the floor near their parents’ bed, Sarat hugging her wailing sister. Simon was at the front of the house, trying to swing shut the shipping container’s hopelessly rusted door, which the family rarely had reason to close in the summertime.

  “Where were you?” he asked his mother. “What’s happening?”

  Martina grabbed her son by the arm and pulled him to the back of her house. “It’s all right,” she said. “It’s just a factory down the way caught fire. It’s just a sound, it won’t harm us.”

  She sat on the floor by her children and held them close. She pulled a little-used blanket from the space below her bed and wrapped it around herself and her daughters. “It’s just a factory down the way caught fire,” she said. “It’s just a loud sound, that’s all. It’ll be over soon.” The more she repeated it, the truer it became.

  THE ERUPTIONS DID NOT RELENT until the early dawn, arriving with unpredictable frequency and severity. By the end of it exhaustion had desensitized the children—the twins curled up against their mother’s breast, Simon seated on the floor beside them, unmoving, watching the sunlight seep through the window.

  Martina stared ahead at the entrance to her home, waiting. In the wake of the explosions she listened now for small sounds—footsteps, whispered directives, the cocking of a gun. None came. There was only the distressed clucking of the chickens and the audible pulse of the crickets and the sound of her children breathing.

  Look what stubbornness took from you already, she thought. Don’t let it take any more.

  She motioned to her son. “You think you can get us across the river in your boat?”

  “Yes,” Simon said without hesitation.

  “Go on to your room—quiet so you won’t wake the girls�
�and pack as many change of clothes as you can get into your backpack.”

  “Why?” Simon asked.

  “Hurry now. I’m counting on you to get us across the river. Your father’s counting on you.”

  The boy stood up quietly. Martina waited until he was done packing and then she stood up and carried the girls, still groggy and half-asleep, to their beds. She set them down and instantly they dozed off again. While they slept, she pulled the Chestnuts’ biggest piece of luggage—an old bronze-detailed suitcase that once belonged to her grandmother—from under the bed. It was deep and wide and brittle at its copper hinges. Stickers covered its sides, each commemorating a visit to some historic site or state park that Martina knew only from the schoolbooks of her youth.

  She laid the suitcase open on the bed; the room filled with the smell of mothballs. Inside she found a couple of pens and a cracked frame with no photo inside. She tossed these things on the floor. She opened her dresser drawers and began stuffing the suitcase with clothes and toiletries. Instantly and without thinking, she developed a hierarchy of need, starting closest to the skin and working outward—tampons, underwear, dresses. She packed two towels and two rolls of toilet paper and a packet of wet-naps. When the suitcase was almost full she stopped and went to the kitchen. She took jars and containers of the least perishable foods—jams, peanut butter, all the remaining military rations. She took the large plastic soda containers and emptied their contents outside in the dirt, and then refilled them from the tap connected to the rainwater tank. She packed the suitcase until it threatened not to close. She sat on it to keep it shut but the old clasps would not hold, and so she took two of her husband’s belts from the dresser and tied them to each other and looped them around the suitcase to keep it from bursting open. Then she found Sarat’s and Dana’s matching Minnie Mouse backpacks and filled them with the girls’ clothes.

  She went outside. Around the south-facing side of the house, near the firewood stove, there was a wide-mouthed drainage pipe that ran from the roof of the home but was connected to nothing. The pipe was sealed shut at its top and bottom. She knelt to the ground and unsealed the bottom cover. A little bit of brown water trickled out of the pipe. She reached inside and felt for a coffee jar. She tugged on it until it came out. She opened the jar and counted its contents: five hundred dollars in American money; another three hundred in Louisiana Assistance Equivalents; three 16-sheets of prewar stamps; two thousand dollars’ worth of rebel currency issued by the New Zouaves in the very first days of the war and virtually worthless now as a trade currency, but which Benjamin suspected might one day be valuable as a historical curiosity; and a broken Rolex wristwatch that once belonged to Martina’s great-grandfather.

  WHEN SHE HAD FINISHED PACKING, Martina set the bags out in the front yard and went inside to wake the girls. They gazed at her, glass-eyed, still exhausted and incoherent.

  “Girls, we’re going to go on a little adventure,” she said. “We’re going to cross the river together, all right?”

  At the mention of adventure, Sarat perked up. “Why are we crossing the river, Mama?”

  “Because we have to go live in a new house for a little while, honey.”

  “Are we going to go see Daddy?”

  “Yeah, honey, we’re going to see Daddy. Now go on, let’s get you dressed. We’ve got to get moving.”

  As she and the girls prepared to leave, Martina removed from the bottom of her jewelry box a couple of photos of her and her husband. They were ancient things, taken with her grandfather’s camera. She tucked them into her dress.

  She walked to the front of the home, where she found Sarat on her tiptoes, struggling to lift the statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe.

  “Let that be, honey,” Martina said. “We’ll come back for it later.”

  “Daddy will want it,” Sarat replied.

  “Just leave it for now. We’ve got to go. Daddy will understand.”

  “No!” the little girl yelled. With Herculean effort she lifted the statue from the table. It fell into her arms, nearly knocking her over. Sarat hoisted the statue, which was almost as tall as she was, and waddled out the door.

  Martina pulled the shipping container’s rusted door shut behind her and held it with a flimsy combination lock she knew would not withstand the teeth of even the smallest bolt-cutter. Then she carried her suitcase and led the girls down the embankment to the waterfront, where Simon and the raft were waiting.

  They climbed aboard. The raft bobbed and sagged under their weight. Martina had never ridden on it before. She had only crossed the river a handful of times in the last few years, usually on Alder Smith’s boat whenever he invited the family into town for one of his cookouts. The raft was a child’s thing, unsuited for the crossing, a polyp on the mouth of the Mississippi.

  Under the reddening sky the Chestnuts unmoored. Martina took the scoop shovel from her son and began to fight the water. Already she could feel the current pulling them downriver, and she knew by the time they crossed to the eastern bank they’d have to hike a mile or more up the road to reach the place where the bus would be. Wells of sweat formed dark and wide on the arms of her dress; her eyes stung. She continued rowing.

  MANY YEARS LATER, in the tents of Camp Patience, Martina would silently curse the day she left her home and took her children willingly into the festering heart of the war-torn South.

  What she couldn’t have known that morning was that the rebels, the federal troops, and the Mexican militias ultimately fought to a standstill; the violence never inched any further into Louisiana than it did on that brittle April day when the Chestnuts left their land.

  Excerpted from:

  WITNESS TO DISUNION: EARLY JOURNALISTIC ACCOUNTS OF THE SECOND CIVIL WAR

  “FIRST SHOTS OF CIVIL WAR”

  At Least 59 Killed, More Than 200 Injured as Fort Jackson Protests Erupt in Bloodshed

  March 15, 2074

  Danielle Manak, The Charleston Feed

  COLUMBIA, S.C.—Federal troops shot at least 59 people dead on Wednesday as the four-day protest at the gates of Fort Jackson turned deadly, marking what many believe is the Columbus government’s first assault in an all-out war on the opposition states.

  “Let’s be clear: this was a massacre of South Carolinians, a massacre of Southerners, and a massacre of all who dare raise their voice in protest,” said Governor Davis Brown. “This is a direct statement from the federal government that if you disagree with the Sustainable Future Act, or any decision made in Columbus, you are the enemy and must be destroyed.

  “This is a call to war.”

  A cadre of Marine guards posted at Gate 2 near Strom Thurmond Boulevard—where protesters have amassed by the hundreds in recent days—opened fire on demonstrators at around noon on Wednesday. The guards were stationed in makeshift towers near a hastily constructed fence intended to keep demonstrators from the base entrance.

  The first round of rifle fire appeared to hit several of the protesters at the front of the demonstration. What followed was a panicked stampede by those further back, who trampled over one another while attempting to flee the shooting.

  “One second the man in front of me was waving his sign, and the next there was this burst of gunfire, and he dropped like a stone,” said Elijah Miller, who had joined the demonstration early Wednesday morning and managed to make his way near the gate before the shooting began.

  “I swear to God that man didn’t have a gun. He wasn’t a threat to anyone, and they shot him dead.”

  Witnesses described a scene of carnage following the shooting, with several lifeless bodies lining the roadway and pools of blood clearly visible around them.

  A soldier inside Fort Jackson, who was not among the guards stationed at Gate 2, said at least one of the protesters near the front of the demonstration fired a pistol at a chain and lock that held part of the temporary fence in place.

  “He must have thought it was an action movie, like he could shoot the lock open o
r something,” said the soldier, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the troops stationed at the base have been given instructions not to speak to reporters.

  The soldier added that, rather than break the lock, the bullet ricocheted back into the crowd.

  “At that point, [the protesters] thought they were under fire, and half of them rushed back while the other half rushed forward against the fence.

  “As soon as the Marines saw that fence start to strain, they opened fire.”

  Many demonstrators dispute that account, saying the Marines were not provoked in any way.

  “The cowards on the other side of that fence opened fire for no reason,” said Paul Hartig, who had been camped out in front of the gate for the last three days. “They killed all those people for no reason at all, and they should hang for it.”

  Reaction to the killing came swiftly. In Columbus, the ten senators representing the federal-aligned Southern states of Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, Kentucky, and Tennessee issued a joint statement of condemnation, calling the incident “an unnecessary and tragic provocation that only empowers extremists and does nothing to ease the country from the brink of war.”

  In a statement by the Free Southern State’s Council, the governors of Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina called the killings “outright cold-blooded murder” and an act of tyranny and treason for which federal president Martin Henley himself should stand trial.

  “Every Southern patriot, upon hearing the news of the massacre at Fort Jackson, will know now as a fact that the federal government in Columbus considers Southern lives to be less than worthless,” the governors said.

  “It is only the willfully blind who can today gaze upon the blood-soaked streets of Columbia and refuse to support the cause of secession.”

  Throughout South Carolina, where anti-federal sentiment has run higher than perhaps anywhere outside the Texas oil fields, violence quickly erupted as word of the Fort Jackson killings spread. In Columbia, numerous franchises of Northern-headquartered businesses—many already shuttered in the months since federal president Daniel Ki’s assassination in Jackson, Mississippi, last December—were torched to the ground. In New Charleston, the bodies of three men, accused by citizen secessionist groups of working as intelligence gatherers for the North, were found bound on the shoreline, their throats slit.