Karina left the women and went outside to the backyard. She found Simon sitting at the muddy landing where the rebel skiffs docked, tossing broken branches into the current.
“You know I told you not to sit this close,” Karina said. He looked up at her and smiled. He had chubby, hairless cheeks and when he smiled the smile displaced them in a way that made him look awestruck.
“You got guests,” she said, helping him to his feet and brushing the wet mud from the back of his pants. “Paying guests.”
“Paying guests,” Simon said.
She led him back into the house. When he entered the living room, the Widow Bentley nearly jumped from her seat to touch him.
“Hello, Simon,” she said
“Hello, Ms. Bentley,” Karina told Simon.
“Hello, Ms. Bentley,” he mimicked.
The Widow Bentley put her hand on Simon’s face. “How are you feeling today, honey?”
“He’s doing real well,” Karina said. She knew the Widow Bentley hated it when she interjected, so she did it as much as possible.
“Karina, sweetheart, could you make Mama and I some tea?” the Widow Bentley said. “She’s had a bad throat all morning.”
Karina left the women with Simon and went to the kitchen. She set the water to boil and took a couple of bags of Mississippi Breakfast from the pantry; she had no intention of wasting the good Chinese stuff on the visitors. In the living room, the Widow Bentley continued to stroke Simon’s cheek.
“How did you sleep, honey?” she asked. “Did you sleep all right?”
“Like a baby!” Karina yelled from the kitchen.
When she returned to the living room, the women were already engaged in the ritual. The Widow Bentley, a Bible on her lap, took her mother’s hand in her own and placed her other hand on Simon’s forehead. Together the three of them resembled the centerpiece of some spasmodic faith healer’s sermon, the evil cast out, out from the soul.
Karina set the teacups on the table but the women ignored them. The Widow Bentley recited the same prayer she recited every time she came to visit, the psalms she knew by heart:
For you will command your angels concerning me to guard me in all my ways;
They will lift me up in their hands, so that I will not strike my foot against a stone…
The Widow Bentley closed her eyes as she spoke and her hands shook and her voice quivered. Her mother looked on with resigned tolerance; her daughter stared out the window at the moving river.
When they were done, the Widow Bentley wiped her eyes and, gripped by a deep, post-cathartic ennui, sought to remain as long as possible in Simon’s company. But the time she’d paid for had run out.
Karina walked the three women to their car. Before she left, the Widow Bentley paid the visitation fee: five hundred Redbacks. Karina took the money and thanked her.
“There’s one more thing,” the Widow Bentley said. “A favor we wanted to ask.”
The woman reached under the Tik-Tok’s backseat cushion and retrieved a shoebox. She opened it for Karina. Inside were rolls upon rolls of Red currency—a hundred thousand dollars, maybe more.
“We took it all out of First Southern this morning,” she said. “Bank manager put up one hell of a fight, but we said, It’s our money, you can’t hold it hostage.”
“What do you want me to do with this?” Karina asked.
“Just keep it for us, is all,” the Widow Bentley said. “Ever since what happened at Patience, things have gotten bad again. In Atlanta you got the Free Southern State and the United Rebels fighting over who’s gonna run the country, but neither of them got much control over anything no more. The fighting’s gotten real bad and everybody’s just waiting on the Blues to push south past Tennessee. Then you know there’s gonna be a run on the banks and President Kershaw’s gonna lock us out to keep the whole Mag from going broke. All we want you to do is keep it for us—just keep it where the boy is. That’s all. Don’t think we won’t pay you for it.”
The woman put the shoebox in Karina’s hands. From the corner of her eye, the helper could see the look of disdain on the widow’s daughter’s face.
“He’s just a boy, Kristin,” Karina said. “He’s not a bank. He’s doesn’t pay interest or buy stocks or anything else. He’s just a boy.”
The Widow Bentley pulled out another five-hundred-dollar bill from her wallet. “We don’t need no interest, we don’t need no stocks. We just need it to be where he is, that’s all. What watches over him is enough.”
Karina watched the women leave along the dirt road. At times she despised people like the Widow Bentley for believing so fiercely in their prayer bead gymnastics and credulous supplications. But most of all she despised them because, in the years she’d spent tending to their ranks, she’d come to believe in similar things—in superstitions: invocations meant to ward off the wrath of the Birds and the sickness of the walled Carolinians; the flight paths of ghosts through the sorghum.
When the three women were gone she went back inside the house. Simon was curled up on the couch with his knees pressed to his chest, asleep.
For a while she wondered what to do with the money. If she had any interest in honoring the widow’s wishes, she’d slip it under Simon’s bed, next to the Bible and the drying leaves. Otherwise she could hide it in the storm shelter next to the fuel drums. But in all these places, Karina worried Miss Sarat would inevitably find the money. And then she would berate Karina, in that charcoal, humorless voice of hers, about taking liberties that were not hers to take. Or, worse, she would say nothing, and one day the money would simply be gone, given as alms to the cause of glorious Southern rebellion.
As she thought it over, she saw through the kitchen window a black shadow reflected on the river. Instinctively she knelt down under the kitchen counter, waiting for the Bird to pass. She knew they rained down death at random, and that if today was the day they chose this place, she’d already be dead—and yet she ducked under the counter anyway, a survival reflex.
Minutes passed. She stood and looked out the window. The black shadow was gone from the river. She stepped outside into the yard. She knelt by her lifeless garden and dug deep into the soil. She dug past the places where fruits lay fetal in their seeds, until finally she reached the dirt below. She set the widow’s shoebox in the grave, and covered it.
IN THE TOWER the young soldier moved, slow and rhythmic, tethered to the beat of her heart. Sarat knew him better than he knew himself: a child of the North’s poor country—the son of dirt farmers, perhaps, or escapees from the torched California parchland or denizens of the ruined Dakotas, the post-prohibition fossil belt. She knew he had become a soldier not in service of God or Country, but Escape—a chance to become something other than his father, to dodge a life spent soldering the backs of solar panels or wading ankle-deep through shit in the vertical farms. Anything, anything else. And if that meant picking up a rifle and throwing on the brown-speckled camouflage, so be it. She had never spoken to the soldier, had never even seen him before this very moment. And yet she knew him down to his soul.
Sarat peered through her rifle’s eye. The soldier’s head floated in the cross-hairs, a buoy adrift.