“That’s not fair.” I could see my mother getting angry. She had a habit of digging her thumbnails into the skin of her middle fingers when her patience stretched. “I married you, didn’t I? She is my family.”
My father recoiled a little, surprised that my mother had taken offense. He was least clouded at the start of the day, least likely to forget or repeat himself, but most often he suffered from an inability to predict how the things he said sounded to ears other than his own.
“I’ll take it to her,” I said, stepping into the kitchen.
My parents looked at me, and then each other.
“Sure, why not?” said my father. “She’s your aunt—go ahead.”
Triumphant, I took the plate. The kitchen counter was a buttercream marble veined with black, and I had just that year grown tall enough to reach it. On my way out I took an oatmeal cookie from the jar on the table and set it on the plate. It seemed incomprehensible to me that so little food could possibly satisfy a body so big.
At the shed I found the doors slightly ajar. I wedged my hips between them and budged them open. Inside, the old prewar bulb was still on—I could feel the heat of it—even though sunlight seeped in through a thousand cracks in the wood. The air smelled of dust and mothballs and the wetness of recently disturbed earth. It also smelled of her.
She was still sleeping, her frame curled into something like a question mark upon a space in the floor where there was no floor—as though the very foundations of the shed had backed away from her quietly in the night. She was snoring and the thumb of her right hand twitched.
As slow and quiet as possible, I set the plate on the workbench. An old black toolbox had been taken down from the shelves—a dust outline still visible in the place where it had sat unused for years. Its contents were strewn about: a screwdriver, a set of pliers, and a folding knife. The knife had a black aluminum handle engraved with initials I couldn’t decipher. There were a few strands of hair on the blade.
I was transfixed by the knife. At home, my mother would not let me near anything with a blade, not even the butter knives whose edges were dull as soap. But something about the confines of the old musty shed made me believe that this was a wild, sovereign place, where my mother’s rule had no power. I was so mesmerized by the rust-streaked blade on the workbench, I didn’t notice when the snoring stopped.
I heard something like a sharp inhale. I dropped the knife and turned to find her on her feet—moving faster than I ever thought possible for someone of such size. Lunging.
But it was not toward me. Like a frenzied prey she darted away to the furthest corner from where I stood. She backed into the walls with such force that the shed itself shook, and I thought the whole rotting thing would come down on us.
Fear of her pulled me toward the door, but something kept me where I stood. I saw the rise and fall of her chest. She looked at me as though I had stingers for limbs.
“Breakfast!” I blurted out. “I brought you breakfast. Look, look!”
I pointed at the plate on the workbench, but she never took her eyes off me.
Slowly, she approached. When she was close to me she knelt down. She leaned in until her face was close to mine and I could feel the milky breath of the newly woken on my cheek.
“I forgot your name,” she said.
“Benjamin,” I replied. “My name’s Benjamin Chestnut.”
She took my chin in her hand and inspected my face. “You look like your father did, when he was young,” she said. “You got none of your mother in you.”
I saw that she had shaved her head, and that there were fresh cuts on her scalp.
“Why do you want to sleep here?” I asked. “It smells funny. We have lots of nice rooms in the house. My parents say you can stay there as long as you want.”
She let me go. Her eyes were red and her face stained on one side with soil. She wore the same clothes she had on when she arrived. It occurred to me then that not a single piece of clothing in our home would fit her.
“Listen very carefully to what I’m about to tell you,” she said. I nodded.
“Don’t ever come in here again.”
SHE DIDN’T LEAVE the shed until dinnertime. In those days, whenever the weather wasn’t too hot, my mother liked to have dinner in the backyard by the levee. We had a beautiful table on the deck, made of real Cascadia redwood. And although the levee blocked our view of the river, we were able to enjoy its breeze.
My mother saw her in the yard. “Come have some dinner, Sarat,” she said. “It’s a gorgeous night—don’t get too many of those anymore.”
She looked at the old plot where my mother once planted her first seeds, back when she was still the help, still an interloper.
“Look familiar, don’t it?” my mother said. “It’s from before, from the old house. You remember how you used to get me that good foreign soil? That’s all we use now, in all the greenhouses. That very same soil.”
IN THE WEEKS that followed, we settled into routine. Our guest spent most of her days and nights in the shed. Sometimes she came outside and walked among the greenhouses, but only late in the evening, when my parents were asleep. I lay awake some nights looking for her out my window.
Whenever I brought her meals to the shed and set them on the ground outside, I peeked in through the doors. I always saw her hunched over a table made of a plywood sheet on stacked paint-can legs. The shed was littered with cheap paper diaries you could only still get from the last dead-tree store in Lincolnton. She was writing in the old way.
My mother said if she didn’t want to be part of this family, it was best to just ignore her. But I couldn’t. Whenever the old widows came by with toys for me, I made sure to play with them out in the backyard from a spot where I could see through the ajar shed doors. But nothing enticed her to notice me.
She seemed to exist in her own wild space, unshackled from the rules and decorum of life as my parents had made me know it. It amazed me to think that she slept on soil and ate where she stood and had been on a trip to some secret place for seven whole years. My sheltered world shook with the realization that it was possible to live this way. I’d been raised in the shadow of walls; she was of the river.
We had fewer guests in the months after she arrived. The politicians who visited from Lincolnton and Atlanta stopped coming. But the old widows still came by every week like clockwork. Some of them wanted to see her, but she would never come to the house.
Sometimes, playing in the paths between the greenhouses, I’d hear the laborers gossiping about her in their strange far-south drawl. They called her a Bluenose and a Pocketmouth and I had no idea what those things meant. But the words sounded exotic, faraway, primed with the stuff of adventure.
LATE THAT WINTER a new visitor came. Through my bedroom window I saw his small motorcade—three busted sedans, the old kind that ran on illegal fuel—at the far gate of the driveway. When I came downstairs I heard my mother say we shouldn’t let a man like that anywhere near our home, that we should tell him to turn right around and go back wherever he came from, but my father said that would make us bad hosts.
The cars came up the driveway to the house. The sound of their old gurgling engines drew our guest out of her shed. From the cars emerged a somber-faced entourage of young men and women, all of whom orbited their boss, Adam Bragg Jr.
With the war coming to an end and reunion finally in sight, this was all that was left of the United Rebels.
“Simon Chestnut, you living saint,” Bragg said. “The only man in the whole of the goddamn Red who deserves his good fortune.”
“Hello,” my father said, uncertain.
“What, don’t you remember me? Remember you came down to see my father that time, got you a nice piece of change from the Martyrs’ Fund?”
“What do you want, Adam?” my mother said.
But the man ignored her when he saw the big broad shape approaching from the woodshed.
“My God, Sarat,” he said. “It does the soul good to see you free.”