American War(10)

“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


Sarat hunched by the front porch, waiting for her mother to return from Eliza Polk’s house. She’d gone there to see about a man.

Nearby, Simon struggled to climb onto the roof of the house. Over the last three days, he’d tried a dozen times to hoist his frame over the edge. He knew that the solar panels began to weaken if they weren’t wiped down every other day, and that without regular chlorination the water from the rain tank began to smell faintly of eggs. With every passing day his inability to complete these responsibilities gnawed at him.

Once again he set the ladder in the dirt against the side of the shipping container. Here the earth was softened by runoff from the nearby standing shower, and the legs of the ladder sank slightly into the mud.

At Simon’s insistence, the twins braced the ladder on both sides, trying to keep it steady. Standing on the top rung, he readied to leap and hike himself onto the roof.

“OK,” he said, wiping the midday sweat from his hands. “Ready?”

“Ready,” Sarat and Dana replied in unison.

Simon braced his hands against the edge of the container. On his tiptoes he peered over the top.

“Hold it steady,” he yelled at his sisters.

“We are,” Sarat replied.

“No, hold it so it doesn’t move.”

“We are!”

Simon screwed up his courage. He thought about the ease with which his father did such labor—how, even when he came home late at night from the shirt factory, his fingers red and raw from stitching, he happily took on the chores of the house: patching a hole in the rain tank, re-boarding the windows after a freak storm, making flour of the sorghum grain with the old hand-crank mill. He recalled the sound of the crank squeaking as it pulverized the grain to fine dust—it was the sound of work.