She wouldn’t have known any of this. Instead, she simply saw a Blue soldier, in full uniform and gear, patrolling the market; patrolling Southern land.
I watched her reach for a butcher’s knife on the stall table. And then she was moving toward the soldier. I’d only ever seen her move that fast once before, the morning she lunged away from me in the shed. The Blue soldier was conversing with a couple of clothes makers at a stall on the far side of the market; he didn’t see her coming.
Somewhere in the depths of me I knew what was going to happen. I started to run, my damaged arm clunky by my side. When I reached her she was a few feet from the soldier’s back. She raised the butcher’s knife high.
I stepped in the space between her and the soldier. I screamed for her to stop.
The sound of my voice startled the soldier. He turned around. I had my back to him but I knew he’d raised his weapon, because Sarat froze where she stood. The knife dropped from her hand.
I began to imagine what would come next. She would be arrested, thrown back in that prison again. This time they’d put her there for good. I only hoped that the soldier behind me wouldn’t shoot her dead right where she stood.
There came a silence. The rage on her face was gone, in its place a kind of disbelief. Behind me, I heard the soldier say her name.
“Sarat?”
And then I heard her say his.
“Marcus.”
ONE OF THE VENDORS had run over to the other end of the street and called the Blue soldier stationed there. He came running, rifle raised.
“On the ground!” he yelled at Sarat. But she did not move, did not look away from the man she had moments ago readied to kill.
“It’s all right,” Marcus said to his partner. “She’s an old friend.”
The other soldier lowered his rifle. He seemed unpersuaded, but Marcus waved him away.
Marcus looked around at all the people who were now staring.
“There a silent auction going on or something?”
A couple of people chuckled, more in relief than anything. As they went back to their stalls, Marcus nodded in the direction of a church nearby. He turned and walked toward it.
Sarat looked at me. “Go back to your parents,” she said.
“Are you going to hurt him?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “I’m not going to hurt him.”
He was standing between the pews when she entered the church, his rifle and helmet removed. She saw then the fullness of his face. It was the same face, the same skin, the same boy. He’d grown a few inches taller in the years since she’d last seen him, but his smallness was the same. And in the way a soldier’s gear is designed to puff out the chest and broaden the shoulders, he looked even more mis-sized, too dense for his height.
He was like a child in the way he looked at her. “I don’t,” he started. “Sarat, I don’t…”
But she did not see him. She saw Chalk Hollow. She saw Cherylene’s pen and the ugly little shower trailer thick with mist and the place high in the trees where you could see forever. She went to him and she held him.
“You’re alive,” he whispered. He kept saying it, and she didn’t know which of them he was trying to convince. “You’re alive, you’re alive.”
They sat together at the pews. The church was plain and musty and resembled the quaint courthouses of old Southern stories. There were seats in the balcony above them but no one sitting in them. They were alone.
“So they took you off the customs ships,” Sarat said.
“Yeah, they do all that stuff up North now. Everything goes through the Blue first before it ends up down here. Cuts down on smuggling.”
“And what about you? You here cutting down on smuggling too?”
Marcus laughed.
“You know, for a while I thought they stationed me down here because they secretly knew I was a Southerner this whole time. But now I think they really put me down here because I’m small. They think it makes all the people down here less hostile if the Union soldiers patrolling the place aren’t the big brawny types you see in the recruitment commercials.”
“Ain’t true, though,” Sarat said. “Hell, I saw you for ten seconds and I wanted to stab you.”
He was smiling and when he smiled she felt as though she could walk to the doors of the church and open them and find a different world waiting.
He lifted his fingers to the place on her neck where one of her thin pink scars began. He traced it down to her shoulder.
“I did this,” he said.
“No you didn’t.”
“You can’t wear this uniform and not know what they did in Sugarloaf, Sarat. I’ve gotten by for a long time looking away, turning my head. And the truth is I never cared much about what either side did to the other because it’s a war and maybe that’s all war is, is shredding the rules. But I can’t do that when it’s you. I did this.”
She took his hand, pulled it away from where it rested on her shoulders. She tried to remember how she’d gotten that particular scar, but in this moment the memory was unreachable.
“You never wronged me,” she said. “You’re the only one still living who never once wronged me.”
IN THE WEEKS that followed, my arm began to strengthen. Soon I was able to move it, although the cast was stiff and grimy. Where the cast ended I could smell the unwashed skin below. It had a rank smell that, for reasons I couldn’t understand, I found strangely addictive.
After two weeks my mother let me play outside, but there were to be no trips to basketball or swimming practice in Lincolnton until the cast came off and the doctor declared the bone fully healed.
One morning I was playing in the backyard. My parents were on the other side of the property, busy haggling with a contractor who’d come to replace our front gate’s busted motor.
There seemed always to be breakages and malfunctions in the small machines that moved our little riverside world—storms came through and wrecked the solar panels; the heat warped the circuitry of our lawn mowers and our generators. It never occurred to me until much later how exhausting it must have been for my parents, constantly warring with the land that housed them.
Sarat was in the kitchen, shucking corn for dinner. Slowly she had begun to make more frequent appearances in the house—sometimes she would sit awhile with us in the living room watching television. A few times she even stayed for dinner. Whenever she did, my parents said very little, trying to pretend like it was no big deal. But every time I could see my father struggling to restrain a giddy little smile. For a while she must have been alien to him, even if he remembered her name and her relation, but I think now he was starting to connect the woman he saw with the girl he knew before. And in doing so I think he was able, in some small way, to connect as well with the boy he used to be.
I watched her through the kitchen window. She worked in a monotone way, her eyes focused nowhere, lost in her own space. But then she looked up, and she saw me, and she came outside. Often she wandered around the property, walking among the greenhouses. But this was the first time I’d seen her come near the levee in the daytime. It was as though she was repelled in some invisible way by the river—not by the sight of it, which was hidden by the seawall, but by the sound of it, the sound of water moving.
“How’s the arm?” she asked.
“It’s fine,” I replied. “In two weeks it’ll be good as new.”
“It’ll be better than that. Bones that set right grow back stronger.”
It was an amazing thing to hear, and whether it was true or not, instantly I believed it.
I stood up. “Do you wanna see something cool?” I asked.
“Sure.”
“Come on, then,” I said. Without thinking I took her hand and led her to a place near the levee protected by the shade of a hanging willow tree. It was there, in a small pen, that I kept my pet.
“This is my turtle,” I said, pointing at the mounded, unmoving animal.
She seemed to forget me for a moment. I watched as she knelt down until her face was almost in the pen, inspecting the yellow, symmetrical markings on the shell.