American War

by Omar El Akkad

  Minutes passed. She stood and looked out the window. The black shadow was gone from the river. She stepped outside into the yard. She knelt by her lifeless garden and dug deep into the soil. She dug past the places where fruits lay fetal in their seeds, until finally she reached the dirt below. She set the widow’s shoebox in the grave, and covered it.

  IN THE TOWER the young soldier moved, slow and rhythmic, tethered to the beat of her heart. Sarat knew him better than he knew himself: a child of the North’s poor country—the son of dirt farmers, perhaps, or escapees from the torched California parchland or denizens of the ruined Dakotas, the post-prohibition fossil belt. She knew he had become a soldier not in service of God or Country, but Escape—a chance to become something other than his father, to dodge a life spent soldering the backs of solar panels or wading ankle-deep through shit in the vertical farms. Anything, anything else. And if that meant picking up a rifle and throwing on the brown-speckled camouflage, so be it. She had never spoken to the soldier, had never even seen him before this very moment. And yet she knew him down to his soul.

  Sarat peered through her rifle’s eye. The soldier’s head floated in the cross-hairs, a buoy adrift.

  THE FIRST WEEKS AFTER the massacre at Patience had been the darkest. The house they were given as blood money felt alien; every night the sisters slept together in a room fully lit, the windows sealed shut with boards. For the first few nights, Dana could not sleep. She lay frozen by Sarat’s side, certain that the men who’d taken their mother and brother would return to take them too. And on the fifth day, when the Free Southerners came from the hospital and brought with them a living shell of the brother both Sarat and Dana thought was dead, Dana screamed, because in a way the massacre was now unending.

  It was only after the Chestnuts’ new life settled into some kind of routine that Sarat began to leave her siblings and venture into the outer world—first to Atlanta, where she petitioned the committee investigating the killings at Patience for some information about her mother’s remains, even though she knew in her heart that all that remained was ash. One by one, a smug parade of Southern dignitaries offered her their thoughts and prayers and the contact information of their assistants. They commended her on her stoicism, on how well she was handling it all.

  She soon learned that to survive atrocity is to be made an honorary consul to a republic of pain. There existed unspoken protocols governing how she was expected to suffer. Total breakdown, a failure to grieve graciously, was a violation of those rules. But so was the absence of suffering, so was outright forgiveness. What she and others like her were allowed was a kind of passive bereavement, the right to pose for newspaper photographs holding framed pictures of their dead relatives in their hands, the right to march in boisterous but toothless parades, the right to call for an end to bloodshed as though bloodshed were some pest or vagrant who could be evicted or run out of town. As long as she adhered to those rules, moved within those margins, she remained worthy of grand, public sympathy.

  But none of it mattered to Sarat. When the weeping widows came to see her brother and touch the wound on his forehead, she let Karina, the hired help, deal with them. When Free Southern State politicians from Atlanta drove up to present the Chestnuts with plaques and framed declarations of solidarity and to have their pictures taken with the survivors of the Camp Patience massacre, she left through the kitchen door and wandered out into the forest and stayed there until they were gone. In the few of those photos that survive today, scattered in myriad Southern State archives and the collected files of long-dead politicians, only Dana appears alongside the glad-handers from Atlanta, her smile radiant and wholly counterfeit.

  In the months that followed, after Dana’s nightmares subsided and the storm of attention surrounding the Camp Patience massacre was over and the journalists and politicians moved on, Sarat turned her attention to the only thing that still mattered: revenge, the unsettled score.

  For weeks at a time she went out to the forest in Talladega, where Albert Gaines kept a ramshackle cabin. There he taught her to shoot. At first he’d asked her if she preferred to make herself a weapon, to become what the Northerners called homicide bombers. It didn’t scare her to consider it, but the thought of abandoning Dana, of leaving her alone to care for what remained of their brother, was too much for her conscience to bear. Yet she wanted to kill. So Gaines pulled his ancient hunting rifle from its rack and set her to sniping soda cans on fence posts.

  At first nothing he taught her stuck—not only because the weapon itself barely functioned, its sight cross-eyed, its trigger unreliable, but also because the memory of what she’d seen was still too vivid. Onto the tin cans her mind painted the faces of those Northerners that night in Patience, and at the hallucinated sight of them she was overcome by anger and a rabid desire to ruin those who’d ruined her. Rage wrapped itself around her like a tourniquet, keeping her alive even as it condemned a part of her to atrophy.

  The hardest thing to learn was stillness. Even after she finally started hitting the cans and graduated to sniping rats, she struggled most with Gaines’s order that she learn to stay in place for hours at a time. Sometimes he had her sleep where she lay, the forest insects crawling over her. He said the most important part about this kind of hunting was fusing yourself to your surroundings, becoming the earth. But she wanted to move, she wanted desperately to move.

  One day Joe came to the cabin. In all her time there, Sarat had never seen Gaines receive visitors, but Joe appeared as though he’d been to the cabin many times, as though it belonged as much to him as it did to Gaines.

  “I have a gift for you,” he told Sarat. “Something to help you in your work.”

  The rifle he gave her was a fine weapon, a QBU-20 smuggled in on the charity ships, packed into a sack of rice. What Gaines’s old gun saw wrongly it pinned with surgeon’s precision.

  She learned to strip it, reassemble it, gauge its temperament. She painted little check marks in red fingernail polish on the black shoulder stock, immortalizing the times when the soul of the gun and the soul of its shooter aligned, even if all that died as a result was a helpless rat.

  She named her weapon Templestowe, after the first true rebel of the Second Civil War, the girl who’d killed the crooked Union president in Jackson.

  “These are the ways in which I can help,” said Joe. “In the end, it’s up to you what you do with such assistance. The guns are ours but the blood is yours.”

  Finally she understood what he meant.

  SARAT LAY MOTIONLESS at the flat peak of a hill, hidden in a skin of brush and reeds. Behind her the hill rolled gently down to the Georgia border, the land etched with a network of rebels’ tunnels. A mile ahead of her stood the southern wall of Halfway Branch, the largest Northern operating base on the Tennessee line, and beyond it the dusk-burned sides of the Smoky Mountains.

  It had taken her the better part of a week to draw this close, shuffling slowly through the flint tunnels—listening for the footfall of passing patrols—and then the brush. She moved by night amidst the hickories. When she finally arrived at the spot atop the hill, she waited another three days, living off dry rations, burying her waste in the dirt. For three days she set her sights upon the southern gate of Halfway Branch and waited.

  She put the rifle down and cast her binoculars upon the horizon. The hastily asphalted road leading to the gate sent upward a heat mirage, and in its untilted rise there were no signs of wind. She scanned the forest between her and the base, looking for the same things the soldiers in the towers looked for: unnatural shadows, straight lines, the glimmer of a shiny black nickel in the brush.

  Gaines had trained her to see these things. In his cabin he laid out a table of items—books, cutlery, a flywheel, a packet of cards fanned out. Every time the items were different and differently arranged. He covered the table with a bedsheet and brought Sarat into the room. He uncovered the table for ten seconds and covered it again. Then he asked her to descr
ibe everything under the table to the most granular detail: the order of the fanned cards, the number of holes on the flywheel.

  The sun set behind the mountains. Halfway Branch lay seared in the dying light, a box fortress of shipping containers and long-drawn tents. The soldiers milled about in their guard towers.

  Sarat lay still. There was a residual dampness in her pants from when she’d urinated without moving, and now that dampness cooled and hardened. She felt it in the hairs of her legs, down to where her bare ankles rubbed against the earth.

  Four soldiers ascended the guard tower. She recognized two of them as muscle, bodyguards watching over the third man. He was older than the others, his hair silver and smoothly parted. He wore the same uniform as the men who surrounded him but he was not of them; there was a calmness in the way he carried himself, the way he nodded as the fourth man and the guard tower grunt pointed out markers on the horizon.

  Sarat knew the soldiers were pointing to the places from where the martyrs came—men and women who walked out from among the black gum trees with the makings of hellfire strapped to their chests. Rarely did they get to within a hundred feet of the gates before they were shot down. And when they came with rocket launchers on their shoulders, the Blues had turrets that gauged the trajectory of those rockets in midair—before the projectiles landed, the ones who’d fired them were already dead. The rebels knew these things, knew the futility of their assaults, and yet every few days another walking weapon emerged from among the black gum trees.

  Sarat took Templestowe’s eye off the young soldier in the tower. She set it on the old man. He had about him an aura of distance, of remove. He was smaller than the men who surrounded him; compact, his fatigues unblemished. She saw the dusk light gleam off four stars on his shoulder. Her informant had been right. It was a general from Columbus.

  The officer’s head came under Templestowe’s eye. Sarat breathed in deep. She eased her chest off the ground; she was still. In a moment Sarat and her black-mouthed girl were aligned. At a pull of the finger, Templestowe let loose a muffled sigh, and before the reeds by her lips had stopped their shaking, Sarat knew.

  Excerpted from:

  ONE SHOT AT HALFWAY BRANCH: THE LIFE AND DEATH OF GENERAL JOSEPH WEILAND

  They laid the General’s body to rest on a Sunday, and all of Columbus came out to see it. Thousands lined the sidewalks as the funeral procession crept slowly up Daniel Ki Drive, past the Executive Building, toward Trinity Episcopal Church. The flags atop the federal government offices—not only in the capital, but across the wartime North—slumped halfway down their staffs.

  From the hearse emerged a fine casket of straight grain and dark cherry hue—no one in the crowd could recall the last time they’d seen such fine mahogany. The pallbearers took their places, a representative from each branch of the United States military, and the President of the United States. Inside the church, Senator Joseph Weiland Jr. delivered the eulogy, speaking before an audience composed of every Union governor and federal lawmaker in the country, as well as countless foreign dignitaries from almost every one of the North’s wartime allies.

  In the early afternoon the gray, impenetrable rain clouds, long a fixture of Ohio autumns, momentarily lifted. The October sun cast a warm amber light on the cemetery grounds. A phalanx of Marines, stiff as granite columns in their Blues, stood watch, and it is said that when the ceremonial guns shattered the air, not a single one of them flinched.

  The assassination of General Joseph Weiland at Halfway Branch marked in many ways the central turning point of the Second Civil War. Shot dead by an unknown insurrectionist sniper, he was the highest-ranking military casualty of the conflict.

  But if General Weiland’s killing marked a temporary victory for the South’s insurrectionist rebels, it also set in motion the eventual demise of the Southern state. Popular opinion throughout the North, which for years favored compromise and reunion over an extended fratricide, seemed to harden overnight. From Pittsburgh to Cascadia came calls for vengeance. And in Columbus, the Union government listened.

  By January of the following year, Joseph Weiland Jr.—only a few years removed from a low-level position in the Compensation Claims office, and a sitting Senator for less than a year at the time of his father’s death—would assume Directorship of the War Office. Under his leadership, the rate of Northern military incursions south of the Tennessee line soared. In the year following the killing at Halfway Branch, more than 250 rebel fighters were captured throughout the South. And while many were ultimately found to have played only a minor part in the conflict and were eventually released, the surge nonetheless helped pave the way for the eventual eradication of the rebel menace.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The general fell dead. The echo of the gunshot rang in Sarat’s ears. In a few seconds a wailing siren began to sound from the Blue fortress. Sarat lifted herself from where she lay. She turned in the direction of the Red country. In the darkness, she ran.

  Soon she found the entrance to one of the rebels’ tunnels. She scrambled through the underground clearing as the sirens blared above. The tunnel was low and dank and wholly unlit; she crawled blind.

  A half-mile south, the tunnel broke at the foot of a steep incline. She emerged from a thatch-camouflaged cover to find the sky streaked with the red of tracer rounds. Something moved near the trees to the west, a mongrel from the border towns in search of food, perhaps. She watched as the gunners in the watchtowers eviscerated the brush.

  Unseen, she scrambled over the hillside. She crossed empty creek beds and the rotted cores of bee gum trees. In the weeks before she set out into the forest, Sarat had studied the land: learned its folds and the crevices, the places where the cover was thickest.

  In a few hours she reached the hills outside Chatsworth, where she knew the Blues would soon send a raid party. Most of those who remained in places like Chatsworth—the border towns that bore the brunt of the Northerners’ incursions—were holdouts. Everyone else had gone south, mostly to the high-rise slums that circled Atlanta. But it was the last stubborn few in the border towns who moved the street signs every week to confuse the soldiers, who spat on the floor at the very mention of Blues.

  She found her old Tik-Tok where she’d left it, by the side of Highway 76. As she traveled southwest into the protective embrace of Georgia, Sarat raised her head to the sky and screamed, victorious.

  She took the small backroads home, arriving in the early evening. Alight with adrenaline, she walked east from the edge of the woodshed into the forest. She walked carefully, counting her steps until she counted five hundred. At the last step she stood in a clearing in the woods, near the riverbank. She knelt down and dug into the dirt. She buried her rifle. She left no markings of any kind, and padded the dirt until it was flat and plain. Then she walked back home.

  From the edge of the yard she saw the maid Karina in the kitchen, kneading dough and humming “Jacob’s Ladder.” There was something about the woman she found foreign—more than her faraway place of origin in the Bangladeshi Isles, which left no markers on her mannerisms or accent. She smiled too often, carried herself too comfortably in a home and around a family that was not hers. Sarat could see that Simon had started taking a liking to her; she saw how his eyes and smile widened when she was near. She knew the woman had done nothing wrong, and yet Sarat felt a rabid urge to remind her that she was just a maid: that she was not of the Chestnuts, and never would be.

  Sarat stepped between the trees and down to the water. She walked into the river. The water felt good against her skin. The night before, when she ran from the edge of Halfway Branch, she’d tripped and stumbled through a thistle bush that left cuts all over her arms and shoulders. Now the places where her skin was broken came alive, burning like flicks of oil against a hot iron pan. But this too, in its own way, felt good.

  When she had walked far enough into the river, and the ground swept down and away from her feet, Sarat undressed. She let the river take
the soiled clothes. She floated weightless, naked but for Albert Gaines’s charm around her neck. The river smelled of dirt and algae but it also smelled of her: the stink of a week unwashed; a vinegar effluent that grew in the spaces under her arms and between her legs. She loved her scent, carried it like her own newborn child. Now, with her eyes wide open, she sank deep into the water and gave it to the river.

  She felt the eyes of the guard in the tower, watching. There was only one tower along the quarantine wall with an unobstructed view of the Chestnuts’ property. Therein sat a young Southern State private, charged with keeping the infected Carolinians from getting out.

  When the family had first moved to the Charity House, Sarat refused to sleep another night under the watch of guard towers. Finally Albert Gaines took her to meet the Free Southerner who manned the tower nearest her house. He turned out to be a hopeless little boy from the Georgia coast; a kid one year younger than Sarat who’d lied about his age to volunteer.

  It didn’t take long for Sarat to understand that the boy, and all the other boys dispatched to babysit Carolina’s living dead, was both Red-blooded and harmless. And in the months that followed, as she lay flat in the forest eying him through her rifle scope, she learned something else too: the watchtower guards were blind. It was a blindness fed by boredom and fear, by having at once too much and too little to observe. Often, when Sarat lay watching, the sleepy-eyed boy in the tower looked right back at her, and didn’t see a thing.

  The river took her smell. It loosened the grime caught in the hairs along her arms and along her legs. When she was very young her father told her that some of her ancestors were once buried near the banks of the Mississippi River, back when it was still corseted with levees. But eventually the river broke loose and took all the nearby houses and the farmland and even the dead in their graves. The river moves, he said, and as it moves it takes.