He beckoned her to the chair opposite him at the table. Even stripped of its old cash register and front counter, the place felt claustrophobic, the walls lined with cheap dark wood and decorated with ancient posters that urged: “Have a Coke.”
Trough stood in the back of the room, near where the chairs and tables gave way to stacks of unopened moving boxes. The first time she had seen him after her release from Sugarloaf—on the day they took her to meet her old captor—she hadn’t recognized him. But he looked familiar now, thin like his older brother; eyes numb and accusing.
“Can you believe it’s come to this?” said Bragg. “Cast out into the wilderness, disowned by our own people. You know what they put in that building we used to be in—the one downtown, under the highway—after they forced us out? The new office of the Reunification Celebration Committee.”
He laughed and shook his head. “They got a whole building of people deciding where to hang the balloons and send the marching bands to celebrate the day we surrender. Jesus, I wish my dad was alive to see it. It would have killed that old bastard twice.”
“I need your help,” my aunt said.
Bragg motioned for Trough to make more coffee. With his eyes still on my aunt, the young man complied.
“Name it,” Bragg said. “We ain’t got much, but what we got is yours.”
“If I told you I could turn it all around—kill every last one of them who run the Blue, wipe out the North, make it so they don’t see the sun for a hundred years—would you believe me?”
“Yeah, I’d believe you,” said Bragg. “I wouldn’t believe anybody else who said it, but I’d believe you.”
Trough placed a cup of coffee on the table and returned to his post, watching.
“I need you to get me across the border,” my aunt said. “I need to be in Columbus for the Reunification Ceremony.”
“Christ, Sarat, it can’t be done,” said Bragg. “They got more men guarding the Tennessee line ahead of that goddamn ceremony than they did during the height of the war. Every crossing’s a fortress, and they ain’t letting a single Southerner through, probably not until the end of the year.”
“What about the tunnels?” my aunt asked. “The ones we used to crawl through to get near Halfway Branch?”
“Sarat, they demolished those years ago. That world don’t exist no more. Hell, other than Trough here, I got three, maybe four good men left. They wore our people down; everyone’s tired and hungry and they all lost the will for war. Go see it for yourself on your way back home—drive into Atlanta proper, look at all those billboards the Free Southern State put up—‘Peace With Dignity,’ ‘Respecting Our Past, Securing Our Future.’ All that horseshit, and people eat it up. You know they don’t even call themselves the Free Southern State anymore? They just use the acronym, never spell it out, like the letters don’t mean nothing. They’re waving their cowardice around like a goddamn flag—”
“I know a way,” said Trough. “I know how you can get to Columbus.”
Bragg fell silent.
“How?” my aunt asked.
Trough came to the table. “There’s a medical shuttle that goes up north. St. Joseph’s has a deal with a hospital up in Lexington. They get to ship a few people up there on the first of every month. They cap it at a dozen patients, and they keep it quiet. But I know the guy who runs it; he and my brother spent some time up at the Tennessee line together. He owed my brother a favor from back then, and there’s no one but me left to collect. I’ll tell him I got a friend who’ll die if she don’t get treatment up north. He’ll bump someone and put you on. Then soon as you cross the border, you can make your way to Columbus.”
Bragg stared at his lieutenant, dumbfounded. He turned to my aunt. “But if you’re really gonna kill as many as you say, that means you’re gonna take something with you—a weapon, a bomb, something. And just because it’s a medical shuttle don’t mean the Blues won’t search it.”
“They won’t find what I’m bringing,” my aunt said. “They can search me all they want, they won’t find it.”
“I have one condition,” said Trough.
“What’s that?” my aunt asked.
“I go with you.”
“The thing I’m going to use, you can’t aim it. It’s a sickness, a kind that will spread to every last one of them in Columbus. Nobody going on this trip is coming back.”
“I go with you,” said Trough.
“No.”
“Let him, Sarat,” said Bragg. “He’s been rotting here praying to be with his family for going on ten years. Give him what he wants—you owe it to his brother, just like that man from St. Joe’s.”
“I don’t owe anybody a single thing,” my aunt said.
Bragg sighed and rubbed his temples. “Let me ask you something, Sarat. During all that time you spent in Sugarloaf getting interrogated, did they ever once ask you whether you had anything to do with the killing of that Blue general, Weiland?”
“No.”
“But that’s the one thing you actually did. All that other stuff they must have asked you about, you probably didn’t have a single useful thing to tell them. But the one guy you killed, they never once asked you about him. Why do you think that is?”
“I don’t know,” my aunt said.
“I’ll tell you why. They didn’t ask you about it because two days after they picked you up, that boy Attic walked right up to the Blue border guards at Harrogate and turned himself in. He told them it was him who killed the general. He made them believe it—told them all the details he knew from listening to us talk about it, except with him as the shooter. Now they got him locked away in Sugarloaf too—in a place called Camp Sunday where they keep the ones they won’t even do the mercy of killing. That’s why they never asked you about the one thing you did, Sarat. That’s why you’re free.”
“That was his choice,” my aunt said. “I never asked him to do it.”
“Nobody asked him to do it, but that don’t change the fact he did. And it don’t change the fact that you’re alive and sitting here now because of it.”
Bragg pointed at Trough. “I know you’ve been through hell, Sarat. I know you had things done to you and I know you were a different girl before. But these boys never even had a before. They were dead before they got a shot at living. Give him what he wants. Let him be with his brothers.”
Trough stood at the table, eyes blue and still, his face unchanged.
“Make it happen,” my aunt told him, “and you can come with me.”
Trough nodded. The last of the Salt Lake Boys left the old brick store.
Bragg stood. He walked to the back of the room, where the unopened moving boxes lay stacked. He began to rummage through them.
“You know, I always used to wonder what lines he used on you,” Bragg said.
“Who used on me?”
“Gaines, when he was trying to recruit you. He had all these different plans of attack, you know, when he was trying to bring someone into the fold. Like if a kid was religious, he’d start talking to them about how it was God’s will for the South to emerge victorious. Or if they were insecure, he’d talk to them about the ever-accepting rebel family. But he always told my father you were too sharp for all that. Too curious too—what was the word he used?—truculent. I had to go look that one up. He said if the course of life don’t recruit her to the cause, no man will.”
Bragg returned to the table, a small bronze star in hand. “Well, Sarat Chestnut, I thank God the course of life recruited you.”
He set the star on the table and passed it to her. It was a pin, rusted and slightly warped.
“My father had these made a long time ago,” said Bragg. “He had them cast in the style of the old Southern State flag. Did you know they drew the stars on that flag all wrong? Had the right-facing edges longer than the others; never bothered to fix it. My father had all these grand visions of a proper Southern rebel army. And so he had these little medals of valor made up so he could hand them out for ‘Meritorious military service in the war against the Northern enemy.’?”
Bragg chuckled. “Poor bastard didn’t even get to hand out one.”