“Sorry, Mama.”
“Don’t sorry me—and pull it up, you’re dragging dirt everywhere.” Martina pulled the dress off her daughter. “I send your sister in to get you, and now you’re out here looking like a mess, and she’s inside probably doing the same.”
“She can’t put makeup on,” said Dana. “She’s ugly.”
Martina knelt down and grabbed her daughter by the shoulders. “Don’t ever say that, you hear me? Don’t ever call her ugly, don’t ever say a bad word about her. She’s your sister. She’s a beautiful girl.”
Dana lowered her head and pouted. Martina cupped her jaw and lifted her head back up.
“Listen to me,” she said. “You go back inside and you tell her. You tell her she’s a beautiful girl.”
Dana stomped back inside the house. She found her sister putting her mother’s lipstick back in the makeup box.
“You’re a beautiful girl,” Dana said, and stormed out of the room.
For a moment, Sarat stood dumbstruck. She was a child still and the purpose of a lie eluded her. She couldn’t yet fathom that someone would say something if they didn’t believe it. She smiled.
OUTSIDE, Martina cooked breakfast on a heavy firewood stove. On the plates and in the bowls there were hard biscuits and sorghum cereal and fried eggs and imitation pepper bacon cooked till crisp in its own fat.
In her slumping cheeks and dark-circled eyes, Martina’s thirty-nine years were plainly visible—more so than in the face of her husband, although he was five years her senior and the two of them had lived half their lives together. She was wide around her midsection but not obese, with an organic rural fitness that made her able, when it was necessary, to lift heavy loads and walk long distances. Unlike her husband, who had sneaked into the country from Mexico as a child back when the flow of migrants still moved northward, she was not an immigrant. She was born into the place she lived.
“Breakfast!” Martina shouted, wiping the sweat from her brow with a ragged dish towel. “Get over here now, all of you. I won’t say it again.”
Benjamin emerged from behind the house, freshly shaven and showered in the family’s outdoor stall.
“Hurry up and eat before he gets here,” Martina said.
“It’s all right, relax,” her husband replied. “When’s he ever been on time?”
“Where’s your good tie?”
“It’s not a job interview, just a work permit. I’m only going to a government office; no different than the post office.”
“When was the last time people killed one another to get something from a post office?”
Benjamin sat at the table in the yard. He was a lean man with a lean face, his near-touching brows anchoring a smooth, large forehead made larger by setting baldness at the temples. He was at all times clean-shaven, save for a thin black mustache his wife worried made him look unseemly.
He kissed Sarat on the forehead and, when he saw his other daughter, her face smeared with red, kissed her too.
“Your girls been at it again,” Martina said. “Won’t learn manners, won’t do what they’re told.”
Benjamin shook his head at Dana with mock disapproval, then he leaned close to her ear.
“I think it looks good on you,” he whispered.
“Thanks, Daddy,” Dana whispered back.
The family assembled around the table. Martina called out for Simon and soon he came around the front porch, carrying in his hands the recently sawed bottom half of the family’s ten-rung ladder.
Seeing the look on his mother’s face, the eight-year-old blurted, “Dad asked me to do it.”
Martina turned to her husband, who bit happily into the bacon and drank the sour, grainy coffee. It was rancid stuff from the ration packs, designed to keep soldiers awake.
“Don’t look at me like that. Smith needs a ladder,” Benjamin said. “Got new shingles to put up; old ones have all gone to mush.”
“So you’re going to give him half of ours?”
“It’s a fair enough deal, considering he’s the one who knows the man at the permit office. Without him, we may as well try to shoot our way across the border.”
“He’s got enough money to buy himself a million ladders,” said Martina. “I thought you said he was doing us a favor.”
Benjamin chuckled. “A Northern work permit for half a ladder is still a favor.”
Martina poured the last of her coffee in the dirt. “We need to get up and fix our roof just the same as the Smiths,” she said.
“We don’t need any more than a five-rung ladder to do it,” Benjamin replied, “especially now that our own boy’s grown tall and strong enough to get himself up there.”
It was a point with which Simon vehemently agreed, promising his mother he’d climb up regularly to add chlorine to the tank and clean the bird droppings from the solar panels, just like his father did.
The family ate together. Benjamin, rail-thin his whole life, inhaled the bacon and eggs with shameless appetite. His son looked on, cataloguing his father’s every minute ritual into an ironclad manual of what it means to be a man. Soon the boy too had wiped his plate clean.
The twins sipped orange juice from plastic cups and picked at their biscuits until their mother softened the bread with a smear of butter and apricot jam, and then they ate quietly, deep in guarded thought.
Martina watched her husband, her eyes still and silent, a look her children mistook for hardness but her husband knew to be just how she was.
Finally she said, “Don’t tell them nothing about doing any work for the Free Southerners.”
“It’s no secret,” Benjamin replied. “They know full well every man around these parts has done some work for the Free Southerners. Doesn’t mean I picked up a rifle for them.”
“But you don’t have to say it. If you say it then they have to check one of the boxes on the form and take you into another room and ask you all kinds of other questions. And then in the end they won’t give you a permit on account of security reasons or whatever they call it. Just say you work in the shirt factory. That’s not a lie.”
“Quit worrying so much,” Benjamin said, leaning back in his seat and picking the stray meat from between his teeth. “They’ll give us a permit. The North needs workers, we need work.”
Simon interjected, “Why do we need to go to the North? We don’t know anybody up there.”
“They got jobs there,” his mother replied. “They got schools there. You’re always complaining about not having enough toys, enough friends, enough everything. Well, up there they have plenty.”
“Connor says going to the North is for traitors. Says they should hang.”
Sarat listened intently to the conversation, filing the strange new word in her mind. Traitors. It sounded exotic. A foreign tribe, perhaps.
“Don’t talk like that,” Martina said. “You going to listen to your mother or a ten-year-old boy?”
Simon looked down at his plate and mumbled, “Connor’s dad told him.”
They finished eating and retreated to the porch. Martina sat on the steps and cleaned the lipstick from her daughter’s face with a wet dishrag, the girl squirming and whining. Simon smoothed the ends of the half-ladder with a sandpaper block, putting his whole weight into the job, until his father told him he didn’t have to work it so hard.
Sarat returned to the scene of her morning experiment, poking at the congealed honey thick in the knots of the wood, enthralled by the amber liquid’s viscosity. It fascinated her, how the thing so readily took the shape of its vessel. With her pinky she cracked the crust and tasted a dollop. She expected the honey to taste like wood, but it still tasted like itself.
Benjamin sat on a hickory chair, the weaves of its backrest frayed and peeling. He looked out at the brown, barren river and waited on his patron to arrive.
“Do you know what you’re going to say to them, at the permit place?” Martina asked. “Have you thought it through?”
“I’ll answer what they ask.”
“You got your papers ready?”