She knelt and dug into the soil near where it met the water. On the surface the soil was warm from the sun but below it was cooler. She dug an elbow-length hole, looking for the little burrowing worms she recalled from her childhood. But there were none. Soon the bottom of the hole began to fill with river water, and she abandoned it.
Nearby, Marcus Exum picked at the fungi growing on the bark of stunted sweetgum trees. He slashed with a penknife at the roots of the wide, white-fleshed mushrooms and placed the bounty in his stitched blanket knapsack. One tree, collapsed completely, was barely visible beneath a second skin of mushrooms. Marcus picked at the parasitic growth until his bag was full, and a small segment of the tree’s coal-black bark was bare.
“He’ll eat that for sure,” Sarat said, climbing over the dead tree. “Heck, I’d eat that.”
“I don’t know,” Marcus replied, bending the edges of the mushroom back and forth. “Maybe it’s poisonous. My dad says a lot of the stuff growing out here is. Says anything growing out here people can eat, they already ate.”
“We’re feeding it to a turtle,” Sarat said. “A turtle ain’t people.”
“Yeah, but poison’s poison. It don’t know who’s eating it.”
“Well, she’s gotta eat something around here. Keep looking.”
Sarat wiped the soil from her hands on the sides of her COSCO Shipping T-shirt and scrambled back down the ravine in the direction of the creek.
She was confined to boys’ clothes now, there being no girls and hardly any women in the camp as tall as she was. And although it limited her to the worn-through jeans and scuffed shirts that once belonged to Simon and his friends, she found it liberating to no longer be measured against the unbearable standard of her sister, who counted in her sprawling wardrobe not a single piece of clothing fit for adventures like these.
She picked the green leaves and tiny flowers of an Alabama supplejack perched low against the water, its branches limp and thirsty. On the ground she discovered a small tangle of sweetgum seeds and black peppervine fruit. All these she deposited in her knapsack.
A few feet away, a clearing led down to the water’s edge. Sarat scrambled down until she was ankle-deep in the warm, muddy creek. A fine sheet of blue-green scum covered the surface of the water. She brushed it away and dipped a thermos into the river and filled it. The water below was tinted brown and, lifted to the light of the sun, glistened with fine particulate.
A hundred feet beyond, the sheltered estuary of Chalk Hollow fed into Sandy Creek, and a mile further to the east, Sandy Creek met the Tennessee River. Sarat could see the rebel skiffs in the far distance, docked near the ruined wharf of an abandoned marina. When the daylight began to fade, they would cross.
Many times the children had seen the rebels, and the rebels had seen the children. Often they crossed paths at Chalk Hollow, where the camp’s feeble fencing was bent and torn to shreds. Over the years, the camp’s residents had learned not to venture this far east, where the rebel boats docked, nor to the north, where clashes between the rebels and the Northern militias had grown more and more frequent.
But to Sarat this place was a small paradise—a land teeming with life, away from the human pollution and unmagical monotony of the camp itself. Soon the rebels became used to the site of the broad, fuzzy-haired girl and her runty friend. They ignored the children, saw in them neither threat nor enticement; the boy was too small, the girl too big.
Marcus clambered down the embankment to where Sarat stood. “We should go,” he said.
“Relax. Have some fruit.” Sarat picked two black peppervine pebbles and offered one to Marcus, who declined. She shrugged and popped both into her mouth. The skin was mushy and broke open with little resistance.
The children marched back inland. For a while they followed the broken, sand-covered remains of Highway 25. Not a mile to the north lay the severed bridge to the Blue country.
They walked west, toward the now abandoned tents that marked the northern end of the camp. From experience they knew which tents to avoid—the ones that, though unoccupied, contained the rebels’ illicit cargo ferried nightly across Sandy Creek.
Officially, these tents near the fence were assigned to refugees long since dead or relocated. And newly arrived refugees, when given assignments here, were quickly warned by more senior residents; inevitably they found some way to relocate further south, closer to the camp’s interior.
The children arrived at a tent near the border between the Mississippi and Alabama slices. It was indistinguishable from all others in the area but for a rectangular gash on the east-facing canvas, cut there by Sarat so as to let more sunlight in.
Using the Phillips head on his knife, Marcus had learned to turn the door’s metal bolt from the outside, and in this way the children believed they could keep the tent’s contents secret from prying eyes. He wrestled with the bolt’s screw head for a moment, and the bolt unlocked. The children stepped inside.
In the center of the tent, four cots were stationed on their sides in the shape of a rectangle, forming a makeshift pen. The inside of the pen was lined with charity blankets.
A yellow-and-black-shelled turtle shuffled glumly in one corner of the pen. It was a small, rotund animal, about six inches in length. The yellow markings on its back were split with black lines in patterns that resembled the fractal aesthetics of butterfly wings. It moved on ancient, leathery feet, at the ends of which grew sharp pointed claws that tore softly into the blanket.
The animal watched the children approach with a muted consternation. Gently it retreated into its shell.
“Is he ever going to like us?” Marcus asked.
“She’s a girl,” Sarat said.
“How do you know she’s a girl?”
“I found her, so she’s a girl.”
“Is she ever going to like us, then?”
“She’s gonna like us when she sees all the food we got her,” Sarat replied.
“Maybe we should just take her back to the creek,” Marcus said, but Sarat brushed him off. She reached into her sack and began laying out the leaves and berries in small mounds on the far end of the pen from where the turtle had backed itself into a corner. Reluctantly, Marcus followed, setting the mushroom heads on the blanket.
“Not like that,” Sarat said. “They’re bigger than she is. Break them first.”
The children lay the food in the pen and then backed away a few feet. Eventually the turtle reemerged from its shell. It observed the spread on the other side of the pen, but did not move.
“Maybe she’s lonely,” Marcus said.
“Can’t do anything about that,” Sarat replied. “When’s the last time you saw another turtle anywhere around here? Or a lizard, or crickets even.”
“Well she must have come from somewhere. She was born, so she must have had parents, maybe brothers and sisters too.”
“Just because she had them doesn’t mean they’re still there.”
The children waited a while longer but the turtle refused to move. Soon Sarat could no longer stand the sight of nothing happening.
She marched to the far side of the pen. As she approached, the turtle once more ducked into its shell. Sarat picked the animal up and carried it to the other end of the pen and set it next to the food. Then she stepped back.
The turtle reemerged. It observed the children again with its orange-backed eyes, and then turned and shuffled away.
“Dammit,” Sarat said.
“Maybe we should try my idea,” Marcus offered.
“I’m telling you, it won’t work,” Sarat replied. “That rat is almost as big as she is. She’s just gonna get more scared.”
“What have we got to lose by trying?”
Sarat acquiesced, and quickly Marcus left and sprinted to his own tent further south. In a few minutes he returned with a galvanized steel bucket. He held the bucket over the pen and tilted it. A small brown field mouse skittered down the side.
All four of the tent’s occupants stood frozen, eying one another. Then the mouse scurried to the pen’s bountiful corner and began eating the berries.