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.”