American War

by Omar El Akkad

  ONE OF THE THINGS I remember most clearly about my mother is her capacity for stillness. Sometimes, when she was out planting strange new flowers in her backyard plot, or painting childlike pastorals on our riverside levee, she would suddenly become perfectly motionless. Once or twice I caught her doing it—frozen, as though trying to escape the attention of some passing beast. Once, after she went back into the house, I knelt by the levee and tried to mimic her, staring hard into the concrete. But wayward thoughts began to pile up in my mind, and in a minute or two I was ready to burst. I was young and I had no use for stillness.

  The morning after I broke my arm, my mother went to see Sarat. The door to the shed was ajar and the light always on. Peering in, my mother could see her hunched on a stool over the worktable, sewing in the old way with a thread and needle.

  “If you want me gone I’ll go,” Sarat said, her eyes still on her work, her back to the door.

  My mother went inside. Even in the coolness of dawn, the shed was hot with the light of the incandescent bulb.

  “This is where they kept us, the night they came for you,” my mother said. “After they took you away and searched the shed, they locked Simon and me in here with rifles at our heads while they turned the house upside down. I never saw Simon like that before, the way he screamed when he saw those guns.”

  My mother sat on a stool near the bench on the other side of the shed. She inspected an old squirt can that once held oil and now served as a pen holder. “I always hated this goddamn shed.”

  My mother turned her eye to the thing being sewn—a shirt of gray cloth, big and baggy as a potato sack. The stitch lines were wide and ragged, the needle disappearing within the massive hand that held it.

  “It’s bad light for that kind of work,” my mother said. “God knows how you can even sleep with that thing on.”

  “I forgot how to sleep in the dark,” Sarat said.

  My mother grimaced. The shed smelled of meat, a butcher shop stink. An ancient fishing box sat atop the workbench shelves, its tackles rusted and never used.

  “I was wrong to yell at you the way I did,” my mother said. “The doctor said it was good, as far as splints go, and Benjamin would have been hollering all night if you hadn’t given him those painkillers.”

  “He’s soft.”

  “Christ, Sarat, he’s six years old.”

  “I didn’t mean it as a bad thing.”

  “He told us he fell chasing a wolf away from the greenhouses,” my mother said. “God knows there hasn’t been a wolf around these parts in years. I think it might be the first time he’s ever lied to us.”

  Sarat looked up from her sewing. “He’s a good kid,” she said. “He didn’t do nothing.”

  “Oh I’m not mad at him,” my mother replied. “He’s lying because he likes you, and he wants to share whatever happened only with you. That’s how little boys are supposed to feel about their aunts. He likes you, Sarat. In spite of everything you do to keep your distance from us, he still likes you.”

  “I thought they’d made a mistake when they told me about him,” Sarat said.

  “When who told you about him?”

  “For a while, when they were still trying to get me to talk, every now and then they’d tell me they’d arrested Simon or Dana or Mama. That’s how little they really knew—they had no idea which of us were dead and which of us were alive. Then one day they came in and said, If you don’t talk we’re gonna have to take Benjamin away. I thought, it’s one thing if they don’t know Mama and my sister are gone, but they don’t even know Benjamin’s been dead twenty years.”

  My mother smiled. The first blue of sunrise crawled through the cracks and illuminated the dust in the air.

  “Your brother’s a good man,” my mother said. “He’ll compromise on just about anything. But when we found out it was a boy, there was no way he’d have any other name. It’s the only time he’s ever put his foot down for as long as I’ve known him. Can you believe that?”

  “Was he still like a child when you married him?” Sarat said.

  My mother sighed. “So that’s it, then? That’s the grudge you decided to keep? All right, let’s pretend he was. Let’s say I took advantage of that simple little boy with the bullet in his skull, the boy I was paid to take care of. Let’s say I raped him too, got my child out of him when he was too badly damaged in the head to even know what was happening. Let’s say all of that was true—take it out on me, then. Be cold to me, hit me even, if that’s all you know how to do. But Simon ain’t to blame for it, and that little boy sure as hell ain’t to blame for it.”

  Sarat folded the cloth and set it aside on the bench. From beneath the bench she retrieved a glass jug full of Joyful, made from the remains of mangoes and peaches and oranges pilfered from the greenhouses. She unscrewed the cap; a rotting sweetness laced the air.

  “You know some of those old war widows still come by, every now and then,” my mother said. “There’s only a few of them still alive, but they still come by to touch Simon’s forehead and do their little hocus-pocus. They still call him the Miracle Boy of Patience, like he never did any other thing his whole life. They still think the miracle is that he survived. But bad people survive too; lucky people survive. The miracle isn’t that he survived, the miracle is that he’s healing.”

  She rose from her stool and emptied out a couple of Southern Freedom Bond mugs that held a few nails dislodged from the floorboards. She walked to Sarat and held one out.

  “Go on,” she said, “it’s my fruit you’re stealing.”

  They drank until the sun was high and the walls bled orange. My mother spotted an old wind-up radio on one of the shelves and cranked it until it spat a hum of static. She searched the bands and found a piece of soft indecipherable jazz. A song crackled through the ancient machine.

  “They ever let you listen to music in there?” my mother asked.

  “Not like this.”

  “I want you to know we tried, Sarat,” my mother said. “We filed petitions, we hired a lawyer. We gave money to the governor and the governor before him until they’d sit down with us. We talked to senators about your case. But none of them would do anything. They were terrified of having their name said in the same sentence as that place. But I swear to God we tried.”

  “You shouldn’t have.”

  My mother inspected a soft line that ran down Sarat’s left cheek, a scar her silence once earned her in Sugarloaf. It ended at the jawline, near a place on her neck where another line began.

  “Christ, I can’t imagine what you went through,” my mother said.

  “I never asked you to.”

  “But you want me to. I mean, you could have left already. You could have up and gone back to wherever you think the fighting still is, killed yourself a soldier or two. Killed yourself, anyway. But you’re still here. I’ve seen it before, when I was a little girl watching my parents treat the wounded in all those hellholes we lived in. You suffered too much not to let anyone know it. You act like we’re invisible, but you want us to know what they did to you. I think you need us to know.”

  Sarat threw the jug of Joyful across the room. It met the wall and turned to shards.

  “What do you want me to say? You want me to say they broke me? Fine: They broke me. They broke me. They broke me. Does it make you happy to hear it? You’re right, I can’t bury it. What am I supposed to do, now that it’s done—just snuff it out like a candle? Last night when you thought I’d hurt your boy you were ready to rip my throat out as revenge. But I gotta turn my back on what was done to me, on what’s been done to me every day since I was your boy’s age? Well let me make it clear for you: whatever part of me can do that is dead.”

  “And yet the rest of you lives,” my mother said. “And yet you sew shirts from cloth and make booze from fruit and write whatever it is you write in those old books of yours. And yet you run out in the night to splint my little boy’s arm. You’re healing, Sarat. What’s bitter i
n you might fight it, but you’re healing.”

  My mother rose from her seat. “You’re right if you think I don’t find you worth loving,” she said. “God help me, I know you’re family and I know I married into your blood and know I should believe that you’re worth loving, but I don’t. So many terrible things made you this way, but I don’t have to live with what made you, I have to live with what you are. And I know you don’t find me worth loving either.

  “But I’ll love you anyway. And your brother will love you anyway. And your nephew will love you anyway. That’s what family does. Take what time you need, Sarat. Heal how you want to heal.”

  THE FOLLOWING WEEKEND, we went to the Saturday market in Lincolnton. I didn’t expect her to come with us, but when I went outside I saw her in the car, the passenger seat pushed all the way back.

  I remember thinking it was something important, a milestone—families take trips together.

  When we arrived the market was in full swing. A throng of shoppers from all over northern Georgia descended on the town every weekend to buy fresh produce—so much so that eventually they started closing off a quarter-mile of Peachtree Street near the old Baptist church and turned the whole thing into a fair of sorts. I liked walking around the market with my parents, watching the sellers run out to greet them. We were rich everywhere in the South but only here were we a special kind of royalty, one of maybe five or six families in the whole state who still did the old small-batch farming, the kind you could hardly do anymore on account of the heat and the storms. I liked to watch the vendors leave their stalls, leave their customers mid-order, and race over to ask what Miss Karina was working on these days, what strange crops she’d managed to revive.

  On this day, though, almost none of them came out to see us. I knew right away it was because of Sarat. Some of the sellers had been acquainted with the Chestnuts long enough to know exactly who she was, but most were scared away by the size of her, the way she shuffled, slow as stone.

  After a while one of the fruit sellers did come over to say hello. He was one of my parents’ bigger customers, exclusive purchaser of all Chestnut Farms cabbage, which he marketed as having all manner of restorative effects. At the sight of him approaching, my mother turned to my father and whispered, “His name’s Sam.”

  The man came and shook my parents’ hands. “Well, if it isn’t my favorite people in all of Georgia,” he said.

  “Hello, Sam,” my father said, smiling.

  “How are you, Mister Simon? You’re looking good.”

  “I’m all right, I’m all right.”

  Sam turned to my mother. “So I hear you’ve got something new.”

  “When have I ever let you down, Sam?” my mother said. “I’ve always got something new.”

  “So let me know! What is it? Tyler from Reunion Farms says you’ve figured out some way to make oranges that aren’t so thirsty. That it?”

  The conversation began to bore me. I looked around for one of the kids’ stalls, where clowns built balloon animals and did card tricks while their makeup ran in the blistering heat.

  It was only then I noticed Sarat had wandered away from us. She was standing by one of the lab-grown meat stalls, staring intently at something down the street.

  I didn’t realize it then, but she couldn’t have known. She couldn’t have possibly known that this was one of the conditions, one of the things the Free Southerners had agreed to as a precursor for peace. She didn’t know that in return the Red got monthly access to a couple of Northern hospitals and the promise of slightly more favorable descriptions of the Southern cause in the Reunification Day speeches.

  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.