From beyond the bend a sound carried ahead of its source. It was not the gurgling noise of Smith’s fossil skiff, but something that cut smoother through the water, a bigger boat. For a moment Martina thought it was one of the rebels’ smuggling ships, out earlier in the evening than usual. She yelled for her children to come back to shore, and they did, hustling up the slippery bank with their feet caked in mud. But when the boat came around the bend its spotlights cast sharp circles on the black water; Martina knew rebel ships run dark.
It was a state river monitor, a twenty-foot launch operated out of Baton Rouge. Nominally, it was supposed to help keep the rebels from running arms across the river to and from the Texas oil fields and the Mexican Protectorate. It moved slow and conspicuous, with glowing solar panels extending out from port and starboard like butterfly wings. The panels were intended to power the boat; only in emergencies was the backup diesel motor to be used. But in practice the officers quickly tired of the panels and their anemic batteries, and out on the water they used, almost exclusively, the fuel whose prohibition they were supposed to enforce.
Martina knew the kind of men who worked on these boats. They were Southerners, all of them, employed by the Mississippi River Protection Agency or the Department of Emergency Security or a dozen other state bureaucracies that were state-run in name only—conceived solely to fulfill Northern wartime objectives. The officers went by the nickname Blue Badges and in rebel parlance these men were said to owe money to the madam. Once or twice a month, a Blue Badge would go missing somewhere along the Mississippi border. His body was usually found a few days later hanging from the twisted branch of a curling catalpa, the lining cut from his pants pockets and stuffed in his mouth. Such were the fortunes of accused traitors—not only in the secessionist country, but in neighboring states whose populace sympathized with the rebels even as their governments sided with the North.
“It’s Benjamin,” said Martina, watching the boat change its trajectory, shifting in the direction of the Chestnuts’ place. “Something’s happened to him. Blue Badges don’t come out here this late at night if they can help it.”
“Just calm down, don’t start getting all those ideas,” Polk said. “It’s probably nothing.” But Martina was already out of her chair and headed for the bank. Midway she met her children coming back from the river. They walked with their heads turned back, fixated on the incoming boat.
“Go on inside,” Martina said. The girls did as they were told but Simon did not.
“They’re going to say something about Dad, aren’t they? I’m not a baby, I’m old enough to know.”
Without speaking, Martina turned and slapped her son across the face. The boy, stung and reddened, was left speechless. So lengthy were the intervals between those moments when his mother’s innate hard strength showed itself that the boy was often lulled into forgetting it existed at all.
“Go inside,” Martina repeated to her son, in whose eyes tears of shock and anger had already begun to well. His face hardened with spite, but this time he complied.
The boat docked against the clay bank and two men in drab brown uniforms came ashore. Their clothes resembled sheriff’s uniforms; pinned to their breasts were stumpy, plastic-looking badges.
One man was tall and thickset. His hair was buzzed close enough to show the pink of his scalp, and even without seeing, Martina could tell there were small rolls of fat on the back of his neck. The shorter man was of slim build, and appeared to be about ten years older than his partner, who himself could not have been more than twenty-one. The shorter man carried with him a slim paper folder, whose contents he repeatedly consulted by the light of his flashlight.
“Are you Martina Chestnut?” he asked finally.
“What happened to him?” Martina replied.
“Wife of Benjamin Chestnut?”
“Tell me what happened to him.”
The officer spoke in a deadened monotone, refusing to look up from the notes in his folder. “Miss Chestnut, at one-seventeen in the afternoon on April first, 2075, an insurrectionist detonated a homicide bomb in the lobby of the Federal Services Building in Baton Rouge…”
The rest of the officer’s speech floated by Martina, unheard. Her vision darkened and narrowed, such that the men’s outline faded into the black river behind them. Vaguely she felt a hot, sharp sickness in the pit of her stomach. Polk’s hand was on her shoulder again, and this roused her from her stupor long enough to interrupt the man talking.
“Take me to him,” she said. “I want to see my husband.”
“Ma’am…” the officer started.
“I’ve got a right to see the body of my husband. I’ve got a right. You take me to him and then you bring us back home. He don’t rest in some morgue, he rests in his own land.”
“Ma’am, until the Department of Emergency Security completes its investigation, I’m afraid…”
“Goddamn cowards,” Martina said. “There’s not one real man among you. You just do whatever they say, don’t you? No different than trained dogs. I hope it’s your family next, I hope it’s your family next.”
“Once the investigation is complete you’ll be able to claim the remains.”
“Get off my land,” Martina said. She bent down and dug into the mud and threw it at the officers. It landed in wet splatters on their uniforms and their boots. She bent down again and this time the mud landed on the back of the officers’ shirts as they walked to the boat.
As he released the rope from the mooring, the younger of the two men turned briefly to face Martina. “Sorry for your loss,” he said.
Martina watched the boat vanish upriver, its outline glistening momentarily as it crossed the rippled crest of the moon’s reflection on the water. And then it turned the bend and was gone.
She heard Polk saying, “He’s with the Lord now. He’s a martyr like mine.”
“Go to the children,” Martina said. “Make sure they get to bed. I’ll be in soon.”
“Honey, I won’t leave you.”
“Go on now, I’ll be in soon.”
She sent Polk back to the house and for a while she stood alone near the muddy descent to the riverbank.
She watched the black river, endless and endlessly moving. She walked north, the earth cool and damp against her feet. Soon she was among the sorghum, the brown pods of grain bunched around their stalks, hard as ball bearings. When she was far enough from her home that she knew the children would not hear, she fell to her knees and screamed.
Excerpted from:
THESE THE CALLS OF OUR BLOOD: DISPATCHES FROM THE REBEL SOUTH
The waking hours were the most unkind. She lay still in bed, the mind aflame, the body paralyzed, unable to face the day. She clutched her mother’s butterfly brooch in her hand, its faded emerald stones smooth under her fingers. The nurses let her keep it, after they ripped the pin from its back.
This was in the days before—before Julia Templestowe became the rebel South’s first martyr, its first killer, the patron saint of its war. It is often forgotten: There’s always a before.
The rebels recruited her with the bandages still fresh around her wrists. They found her in a bar on Farish Street across from the abandoned Alamo Theatre, its blue vertical sign missing its first and last letters. She was wearing a stranger’s throwaway dress, given to her by one of the nurses. She was drunk and alone once again with the terrible illness in her brain.
They knew how to find the ones who were most likely to do it. They kept watchers in the hospitals, where they looked for suicide attempts, and in the schools, where they looked for outcasts, and in the churches, where they looked for hard-boiled extremists feverish with the spell of the Lord.
From these, they forged weapons.
On the day the President was set to come to Jackson, they drove Julia to an abandoned farmhouse ten miles south of the city, where they outfitted her for death. She was to go in the guise of a pregnant woman. Within the cavity of her false belly they packed a thick paste of fertilizer and diesel fuel, planted with seeds of iron nail. They called it a farmer’s suit. A wire ran up along her chest and back down her left arm, covered by the sleeve of her shirt, and ending at a detonator taped to her wrist.
They’ll remember you forever, they told her. When this is over they’ll build cities in your name.
CHAPTER THREE