The shorter boy said nothing. The taller one nodded.
They must have wondered why she did not kill them—why, with the knife so close to their throats, she stood and knocked the table over and screamed and left them there.
Outside, Bragg and his group waited. When they saw the color of her hands and the color of her clothes, some of them looked away and others smiled.
“We’ll burn it down with them in it,” said Bragg. “Nobody will ever know.”
“No,” she said. “The boys and their mother are still alive. Let them go.”
“Let them go where?”
“I don’t care. Smuggle them past the western line out into Blue country. Send them home.”
“Sarat, they might have seen things. They might have recognized voices, they could tell…”
“Send them home,” she said.
ON THE LONG DRIVE BACK she saw Atlanta in the distance. It had grown during her years in Sugarloaf.
“I heard Albert Gaines killed himself a few years back,” she said. “Where’s he buried?”
“Oh, he ain’t dead, or at least he’s still breathing,” said Bragg. “After the Blues let him go he went off to that shack of his in the forest, doesn’t speak to nobody or go nowhere, just rotting away with none but his guilt for company. Let the maggots bury him when the time comes, goddamn Pocketmouth rat.”
“So it’s true that he’s the one who told them?”
“He’s one of the ones. Soon as they started rounding people up, suddenly all these proud Southern patriots started squealing. He didn’t just give you up, he must have told them a hundred names. Truth is, I’d have killed him myself if my father hadn’t made me promise not to. But that promise is binding on me—it sure as hell ain’t binding on you.”
They traveled slowly on the highways that circled the Southern capital, theirs the only old fossil car on the road. She saw now that all the other vehicles around them were distant descendants of the old Tik-Toks, powered entirely by the sun. She remembered the old wartime footage of hollering Southerners on the back of huge fossil trucks, revving their engines in defiance. All that was gone now, and looking at the roads you’d think there never lived a single Southerner who’d ever wanted anything to do with the old fuel that started the war. Drivers in nearby cars looked at the sluggish fossil sedan in which she rode, some with curiosity at the sight of the ancient thing, others with disgust. But none tried to stop them, none said a word.
She remembered something Albert Gaines once told her all those years ago in Patience. He said when a Southerner tells you what they’re fighting for, you can agree or disagree, but you can’t ever call it a lie. Right or wrong, he said, a man from our country always says exactly what he means, and stands by what he says.
Even that, it turned out, was a lie.
SHE CAME HOME just before dawn, sneaking in over the eastern seawall. I cracked my bedroom window open and very quietly I leaned out to watch her. By the side of the shed she stripped naked and washed her clothes and herself with water from the garden hose.
Hers is the first naked body I remember. I looked on, mesmerized by the strange scars and disfigurements I assumed were the property of all adult skin.
Excerpted from:
REASONABLY SATISFACTORY AND ENCOURAGING TO ALL: AN ORAL HISTORY OF THE REUNIFICATION TALKS
DAVID CASTRO (Peace Office Senior Negotiator, 2089–2095): I remember the day their delegation came up from Atlanta. We spent six months preparing for it, so that by the time negotiations started, we had thousands of pages of notes on every conceivable topic. Border controls, restitution, prisoner swapping, you name it. Before we came to the table, we knew exactly how far the President was willing to go, how much he was willing to concede. We thought we’d covered all our bases.
Then the first day of negotiations came around. I remember we were meeting in a large boardroom in the basement of the Peace Office. There were five of us on the Union side, a small delegation because we had no real authority. Everything had to be approved later on in the Executive Building. But when the South’s negotiating team showed up, there must have been two dozen of them. Each one had a different title, Director of Revolutionary This, Secretary of Patriotic That. One guy gave me his card; it said he was a Constitutional Defense Officer.
We thought they’d want to start with travel restrictions, or amnesty for all those rebels we had sitting in the detention camps. Or maybe they were desperate and would want to talk money. They’d held out for so long with their stubborn reliance on fossil fuels while the rest of the world moved on, their cities were falling apart, and we thought we could get them to make all kinds of concessions in exchange for infrastructure money.
We had a little agenda ready for them with a few proposed starting points to kick off the negotiations. But I still remember, the very first day, their chef de mission sits at the table, pushes the agenda aside without reading it, and says to us, “First thing’s first: I don’t want to hear a single one of you ever use the word Surrender.”
It turned out they didn’t give a damn about travel restrictions or prisoner swaps or any of those things. For three days straight all they wanted to do was haggle over the wording of the Reunification Day speeches and the preamble of the peace agreement. Every day they’d come up with something new they wanted included in the public record—one time it’d be some nonsense about courage in the face of aggression, the next time it’d be about the necessity of self-defense and the protection of long-cherished ways of living. Hell, I remember we spent a couple of hours one day planning out how the Reunification Day photo op would go. They wanted their President to be the one to extend his hand first, and ours then to take it. The next day, they changed their mind; now they wanted our President to reach out first.
Of course, the other negotiators on the Union team loved all this, because they were getting their way on all the strategic stuff. And the people in the Executive Building were happy to go along with it because they were looking further down the line, to a time when they’d have to campaign for all those Southerners’ votes. I was the only one who put up a fight. I told the President’s people if we go along with this, if we nod and smile while they parade some fantasy about this being a noble disagreement between equals, and not a bloody fight over their stubborn commitment to a ruinous fuel, the war will never really be over.
But in the end, Columbus went along with it. And even today, all these years later, we live with the consequences. They didn’t understand, they just didn’t understand. You fight the war with guns, you fight the peace with stories.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
In the spring of ’95 I broke my arm. It was a small break and the bone healed quickly, but it’s the first I remember of pain.
It happened in May, at the tail end of what had been a bad few months. The stress of our new living arrangement—my aunt barricaded behind the doors of our woodshed—was starting to gnaw even at my father’s tranquility. Many nights I lay flat against the cooling vent in my bedroom and listened to him and my mother argue downstairs.
“She hasn’t said a word to us in four months,” I heard my mother say. “Not even good morning, like we don’t even deserve that.”
“It takes time,” my father replied. “She needs time.”
“Stop saying that. What she needs is a doctor, a therapist, somebody they train to deal with people who’ve been through what she’s been through. She needs help we can’t give her.”
“The man from the Red Crescent said she needs to learn how to be free,” my father said.