Four soldiers ascended the guard tower. She recognized two of them as muscle, bodyguards watching over the third man. He was older than the others, his hair silver and smoothly parted. He wore the same uniform as the men who surrounded him but he was not of them; there was a calmness in the way he carried himself, the way he nodded as the fourth man and the guard tower grunt pointed out markers on the horizon.
Sarat knew the soldiers were pointing to the places from where the martyrs came—men and women who walked out from among the black gum trees with the makings of hellfire strapped to their chests. Rarely did they get to within a hundred feet of the gates before they were shot down. And when they came with rocket launchers on their shoulders, the Blues had turrets that gauged the trajectory of those rockets in midair—before the projectiles landed, the ones who’d fired them were already dead. The rebels knew these things, knew the futility of their assaults, and yet every few days another walking weapon emerged from among the black gum trees.
Sarat took Templestowe’s eye off the young soldier in the tower. She set it on the old man. He had about him an aura of distance, of remove. He was smaller than the men who surrounded him; compact, his fatigues unblemished. She saw the dusk light gleam off four stars on his shoulder. Her informant had been right. It was a general from Columbus.
The officer’s head came under Templestowe’s eye. Sarat breathed in deep. She eased her chest off the ground; she was still. In a moment Sarat and her black-mouthed girl were aligned. At a pull of the finger, Templestowe let loose a muffled sigh, and before the reeds by her lips had stopped their shaking, Sarat knew.
Excerpted from:
ONE SHOT AT HALFWAY BRANCH: THE LIFE AND DEATH OF GENERAL JOSEPH WEILAND
They laid the General’s body to rest on a Sunday, and all of Columbus came out to see it. Thousands lined the sidewalks as the funeral procession crept slowly up Daniel Ki Drive, past the Executive Building, toward Trinity Episcopal Church. The flags atop the federal government offices—not only in the capital, but across the wartime North—slumped halfway down their staffs.
From the hearse emerged a fine casket of straight grain and dark cherry hue—no one in the crowd could recall the last time they’d seen such fine mahogany. The pallbearers took their places, a representative from each branch of the United States military, and the President of the United States. Inside the church, Senator Joseph Weiland Jr. delivered the eulogy, speaking before an audience composed of every Union governor and federal lawmaker in the country, as well as countless foreign dignitaries from almost every one of the North’s wartime allies.
In the early afternoon the gray, impenetrable rain clouds, long a fixture of Ohio autumns, momentarily lifted. The October sun cast a warm amber light on the cemetery grounds. A phalanx of Marines, stiff as granite columns in their Blues, stood watch, and it is said that when the ceremonial guns shattered the air, not a single one of them flinched.
The assassination of General Joseph Weiland at Halfway Branch marked in many ways the central turning point of the Second Civil War. Shot dead by an unknown insurrectionist sniper, he was the highest-ranking military casualty of the conflict.
But if General Weiland’s killing marked a temporary victory for the South’s insurrectionist rebels, it also set in motion the eventual demise of the Southern state. Popular opinion throughout the North, which for years favored compromise and reunion over an extended fratricide, seemed to harden overnight. From Pittsburgh to Cascadia came calls for vengeance. And in Columbus, the Union government listened.
By January of the following year, Joseph Weiland Jr.—only a few years removed from a low-level position in the Compensation Claims office, and a sitting Senator for less than a year at the time of his father’s death—would assume Directorship of the War Office. Under his leadership, the rate of Northern military incursions south of the Tennessee line soared. In the year following the killing at Halfway Branch, more than 250 rebel fighters were captured throughout the South. And while many were ultimately found to have played only a minor part in the conflict and were eventually released, the surge nonetheless helped pave the way for the eventual eradication of the rebel menace.
CHAPTER TEN
The general fell dead. The echo of the gunshot rang in Sarat’s ears. In a few seconds a wailing siren began to sound from the Blue fortress. Sarat lifted herself from where she lay. She turned in the direction of the Red country. In the darkness, she ran.
Soon she found the entrance to one of the rebels’ tunnels. She scrambled through the underground clearing as the sirens blared above. The tunnel was low and dank and wholly unlit; she crawled blind.
A half-mile south, the tunnel broke at the foot of a steep incline. She emerged from a thatch-camouflaged cover to find the sky streaked with the red of tracer rounds. Something moved near the trees to the west, a mongrel from the border towns in search of food, perhaps. She watched as the gunners in the watchtowers eviscerated the brush.
Unseen, she scrambled over the hillside. She crossed empty creek beds and the rotted cores of bee gum trees. In the weeks before she set out into the forest, Sarat had studied the land: learned its folds and the crevices, the places where the cover was thickest.
In a few hours she reached the hills outside Chatsworth, where she knew the Blues would soon send a raid party. Most of those who remained in places like Chatsworth—the border towns that bore the brunt of the Northerners’ incursions—were holdouts. Everyone else had gone south, mostly to the high-rise slums that circled Atlanta. But it was the last stubborn few in the border towns who moved the street signs every week to confuse the soldiers, who spat on the floor at the very mention of Blues.
She found her old Tik-Tok where she’d left it, by the side of Highway 76. As she traveled southwest into the protective embrace of Georgia, Sarat raised her head to the sky and screamed, victorious.
She took the small backroads home, arriving in the early evening. Alight with adrenaline, she walked east from the edge of the woodshed into the forest. She walked carefully, counting her steps until she counted five hundred. At the last step she stood in a clearing in the woods, near the riverbank. She knelt down and dug into the dirt. She buried her rifle. She left no markings of any kind, and padded the dirt until it was flat and plain. Then she walked back home.
From the edge of the yard she saw the maid Karina in the kitchen, kneading dough and humming “Jacob’s Ladder.” There was something about the woman she found foreign—more than her faraway place of origin in the Bangladeshi Isles, which left no markers on her mannerisms or accent. She smiled too often, carried herself too comfortably in a home and around a family that was not hers. Sarat could see that Simon had started taking a liking to her; she saw how his eyes and smile widened when she was near. She knew the woman had done nothing wrong, and yet Sarat felt a rabid urge to remind her that she was just a maid: that she was not of the Chestnuts, and never would be.
Sarat stepped between the trees and down to the water. She walked into the river. The water felt good against her skin. The night before, when she ran from the edge of Halfway Branch, she’d tripped and stumbled through a thistle bush that left cuts all over her arms and shoulders. Now the places where her skin was broken came alive, burning like flicks of oil against a hot iron pan. But this too, in its own way, felt good.