Sarat watched. She pulled her knife from her pocket and unfolded it. She walked outside, toward the man, who had his back to her. She was no longer afraid. She moved as a wraith, a cold conflagration in the skin of a girl. She approached the man and when she was upon him she reached around his neck and slashed open his throat.
The man reached for her arm and caught it. She pushed him against the wall. They both fell, she on top of him, he on top of the corpses. A cascade of blood erupted from where she’d cut him open. She pinned him down and kept slashing, the neck slippery now with blood. Soon the man stopped fighting, but she kept moving the knife back and forth, back and forth, until she hit something deep within the body she could not sever. She screamed. She stabbed at the back of his head and when the knife hit the hard bone of the skull it held. Sarat’s left hand slipped from the bloody handle and slid down the blade, cutting a deep gash across her palm. The pain was anesthetic. The heat of life left the man but this time Sarat did not feel it.
THE FREE SOUTHERNERS ARRIVED at dawn: a convoy of soldiers dispatched from Atlanta. They rumbled through the gates and into the camp. Behind them came trucks and aid buses bearing the symbol of the Red Crescent, and behind those came a couple of journalists.
The soldiers disembarked from their trucks. They were boys and young men, many of them having never seen a day of fighting. They walked among the corpses and the pyres, dumbfounded, their weapons drawn at phantoms. Quietly, the foreign observers and the journalists began to count and document the dead.
The sun rose over Patience. The survivors, some mutilated, others dumb with shock, crawled from their hiding places and the places where they’d been discarded. The staff who’d hidden in the administrative building emerged holding the flag of the Red Crescent above them, screaming their affiliation.
Sarat walked around the building and when the Reds saw her they raised their weapons and told her not to move. One of the soldiers ordered her to get down on her knees. Sarat stood, soaked in blood.
When one of the camp’s staff saw her she told the soldiers to lower their weapons.
“She’s one of the refugees, she’s one of the refugees,” the woman said, rushing toward the girl.
“Sarat, honey, put that knife down,” the woman said. “It’s done. It’s over.”
Sarat turned her gaze from the boys and their guns to the woman. She pushed the woman aside and walked into the administrative building. She descended the stairs and walked to the office where her sister hid. She knocked on the door three times, then twice, then once—a secret knock they’d shared for years. Slowly there came a shuffling sound from the other side of the door.
“It’s me,” Sarat said. “They’re gone.”
Dana opened the door slowly. She saw her sister.
“Oh God,” she said. “What did they do to you?”
“Let’s go,” Sarat replied.
She led her sister out of the building. The Southern soldiers were in the courtyard, putting out the fires and searching the tents.
The soldiers covered the bodies and what was left of them with white cloth and then placed them on stretchers and carried those stretchers to the beds of the waiting trucks. Men with masks over their mouths and noses kept a tally on clipboards. The journalists took pictures of the dead and asked questions of the survivors, who looked straight through them with flint-lacquered eyes. The handful of unharmed survivors were ushered quickly onto waiting buses.
When she saw the carnage, Dana screamed. Sarat took her in her arms and buried her head against her chest.
“They killed them, didn’t they?” Dana cried. “Mama and Simon. They killed them.”
Sarat guided her sister in the direction of one of the buses, where a handful of survivors sat in silence.
“Go with them,” Sarat said. “If Mama and Simon are alive, I’ll find them. If they’re dead, I’ll find them.”
One of the surviving camp workers came to where the twins stood. “You can’t stay, Sarat,” she said.
“I’m gonna bury my people,” Sarat replied.
“The soldiers are taking care of them. They’ll be treated with respect. But you have to leave here, Sarat. It’s not safe—they might come back.”
“I’m staying. If you don’t like it, have them shoot me.”
Sarat turned to her sister. “We’ll be together again soon, I promise.”
Dana retrieved a handkerchief from her pocket and tied it around the wound on Sarat’s left palm. She hugged her sister.
“Beautiful girl,” she said.
Dana boarded the bus. Sarat walked to Mississippi, toward the smoldering remains of a fire. She walked past the tents, many of them slashed open, their doors broken down. She choked on the smell of burning.
She reached her own tent. The door had been kicked open and the Chestnuts’ belongings lay strewn on the beds and on the floor. But there was nobody inside.
Sarat crossed the dirt footpath to another tent down the way, the place where she believed her mother might have gone the night before to see her friends. Here too the door had been broken open.
Sarat paused at the threshold. She tried to steel herself for what she might find inside, tried to preemptively imagine her mother’s body, the life gone from it. But she was incapable of making herself imagine it. Instead, her mind recoiled and offered only a feeble, child’s defense: My mother cannot be dead because she is my mother. Everyone else can die but not my mother.
Sarat stepped inside the tent. There was blood on the floor and blood on the walls, but there were no bodies.
Outside, by the tent’s broken door, she saw lines in the dirt. Wide swaths, like the beginnings of infant canals. Without following the trails, she knew where they would lead. In the distance, not far away, smoldered the blackened remains of a large and dying fire.
THE SOLDIERS WORKED QUIETLY. She worked alongside them, numb to the world around her. She helped cover the dead in white cloth and carry them to the waiting trucks. The bodies were placed atop the beds and when the beds were full the trucks were dispatched south and new ones came to take their place. By nightfall the murdered had been cleared and the fires quenched and the survivors dispatched to some far-off hospital.
Most of the soldiers were ordered back to Atlanta but some were left to stand guard over Patience. The ones who were ordered to remain cursed their luck for having to spend the night in the camp. The dead were gone but the smell of them lingered. The echoes of them lingered.
Sarat walked north. In Alabama there were also soldiers stationed at the now gutted fence but one was asleep in his chair and the other was watching a movie on his tablet and neither noticed her presence. The soldiers seemed certain the men who’d done the killing would not return. In the distance behind them the floodlights of the Blues, so bright one night ago, were dark.
Sarat entered the tent in which she and Marcus had kept their pets. She saw that the mouse had fled, but Cherylene the turtle remained in her pen.
She picked the animal up, but it did not retreat. She walked with it back to the center of the camp and placed it on the seat of the last remaining bus. There were only a few people left in the camp now: men and women with gloves and face masks who continued to document the killings. They took pictures of bullet holes in the sides of the buildings, of dried stains in the dirt.
Sarat returned to Albert Gaines’s office. She closed the door behind her. In the camp the smell was of fire smoke but in this room it was of other things: fine wood and old ink on paper and patent shoes and well-ironed suits.
Sarat closed the door behind her. She tore the maps from the walls. She flipped the table. She pushed the bookshelves over and pulled the fine prewar suits from their hangers and smashed the plates on the floor. She ripped apart the old antique books, shredded their pages and broke their spines. Then she sat on the floor and wept.
In a while the door opened and Albert Gaines entered the room. He stepped over the broken bookshelves and around the upturned table and sat on the floor opposite Sarat. He appeared as though from another world, his prewar suit immaculate, untouched by dirt or blood.