My aunt held the rebel star in her hand. The pin in the back held fast to its catch with rust, and would not open.
“Is it really going to work, this thing you have?” asked Bragg. “When you set it loose in Columbus, it’ll be enough to kill all of them—the Blues, the Southern traitors, the whole lot of ’em?”
“Everyone,” my aunt said.
Bragg reached over and took my aunt’s hand in his. “You’re going to be remembered, Sarat,” he said. “You’ll be a hero to the Southern cause for as long as the South exists. When this is over they’ll build cities in your name.”
My aunt pulled her hand away. She tossed the flawed star to the ground. She stood.
“Fuck the South,” she said. “Fuck the South and everything it stands for.”
SHE LEFT STONE MOUNTAIN. She drove west, through the capital and through the state, into Alabama. She went to the forest. For the last time, she went to see Albert Gaines.
The Talladega forest was thinner than she remembered it, the trees seemingly further apart. But the path to the cabin was the same, singed in her memory from all those times she’d stalked through this place, picking off cans, hunting rats.
She intended to gut the old man the way she’d gutted the guard who’d drowned her.
She opened the door and found him sitting inside, asleep in his chair.
Bragg had told her he’d suffered a stroke in the detention camp, right after he and the other recruiters had been rounded up. She saw the damage on the right side of his face. He was sitting in an old rusted wheelchair, wearing soiled pajamas whose stitching was coming apart. His hair was white and thin.
He looked old, ancient. His breathing was a fine whistle, the air leaking out of his mouth. She understood then why none of the remaining rebels had come out here to put a bullet in his head and stuff his mouth with the lining of his pockets. It would have been a kindness.
He woke at the sound of her footsteps. When he saw her he recoiled and his breathing grew quicker; his mouth opened but nothing came out. She saw his eyes, darting like gas lamp flames. For a moment he looked her over, unsure, but she knew he recognized her. Just like she knew she would always recognize him. Even if it had just been a pile of bones she found when she walked into that shack, she’d know it was him.
She looked around the room. Dirty dishes lined the table and filled the sink. There were clothes on the floor—not the fine suits she remembered, but undershirts and cheap pants from the sweatshops down south. In one corner of the room there was a bookshelf but it was empty.
On a table near the bed she saw the old stereo Gaines used to keep in his office in Patience. Of all the things in the cabin, only the stereo showed no accumulation of dust. She set it to play. The old classical number filled the room; the song of the weary pilgrim.
She knelt beside him. She drew in close. He was alien to her now, this feral, sickly old man. But what was inside him was still the same.
He looked at her. Between the soft heaves of his breathing he said, My daughter.
He said it again and again: My daughter, my daughter. Every time it sounded like an unfinished sentence, like there was more coming, but it was just those two words.
And then his breathing halted, and for a moment she thought that he had left her, that this was his final act of abuse: to die before her.
Then he exhaled and with the exhale came all of what he’d been trying to say.
“They said they would hurt my daughter.”
She took the knife from her pocket, the knife he’d given her all those years ago. She opened his gnarled fingers to reveal the yellow skin of his palm. She gave it back to him.
IN LATE JUNE the storms subsided and new crops were born. For months my mother had tried in secret to grow strawberries in the greenhouses, and suddenly the plants began to deliver. The leaves sagged with berries thick as fists, dark and bursting with juice. My mother invited all her friends to come try the farm’s newest produce, and all agreed the strawberries were the best they’d ever had.
One night, my parents got into an argument. Afterward my father went outside for a walk. Sometimes when he wanted to be alone, he sat on the levee, looking out at the river and the quarantine wall.
In a while his sister emerged from her shed and joined him.
They sat under the light of a copper moon. A westward wind made the willow leaves dance like charmed snakes. The river moved.
“She wants to go north, after they sign the treaty,” my father said. “To Pittsburgh or upstate New York. She wants to sell the farm and the house and move there.”
Sarat tried to gauge the state of her brother’s lucidity, whether he was liable to leave her and wander to his clouded place.
“And what do you want?” she asked.
“I don’t want to go.”
The sound of humming motors came across the water. Somewhere, shielded by the night, a dredging ship slowly changed the shape of the river.
“I remember when we were kids back in Louisiana and Dad first said he was going to go up to the permit office in Baton Rouge and try to get a pass to the North,” my aunt said. “I still remember how much you hated him for it. You kept telling Dana and me how anyone that wants to go up to the Blue country is a traitor. One time I even saw you packing a little bag and burying it in the dirt near that raft you had, like if Dad really tried to make us go north, you’d just take your things and sail off into the Mississippi Sea, go live on one of those man-made islands in the Gulf.”
She chuckled. She turned to look at her brother and saw that he was smiling, his eyes cast down at his feet.
“You don’t remember any of it, do you?” she said.
My father shook his head. “It just gets away from me sometimes. I can…” He rubbed his temple. “Truth is I’d be happier if I didn’t remember any of it, if there wasn’t anything left of it at all.”
My aunt watched the guards in their towers on the other side of the river. She wondered if it was the same boys from her youth who still guarded the quarantine wall. The only signs of them now were small pulsing lights that blinked red against the darkness.
“It’s strange, isn’t it,” she said, “what sticks with you and what doesn’t, the things you decide to keep. The night after the massacre at Patience, I remember I’d sent Dana away, and the soldiers had taken you to the morgue, thinking you were dead, but I didn’t want to leave. Some of the bodies were still there, you could still smell that burning in the air, from when they’d tossed the dead in the fire—but I wanted to stay. I wanted to find Mama, anything that was left of her, even if it was just ash. Finally the soldiers told me I had ten minutes to get my things before they were going to tie me up and throw me on the last bus out. So I went back, and you know what I took? I took Dad’s old statue, the Virgin of Guadalupe; I took that turtle Marcus and I kept as a pet; I took a couple of old photos from Mama’s bunk. I didn’t take any clothes, didn’t take any of the money Mama had saved up all her life. Not a single useful thing. Just junk.”
“It wasn’t junk,” my father said. “It was our past.”
“That’s exactly what it was,” she said. “There’s this passage in one of the books Albert Gaines once gave me. It said in the South there is no future, only three kinds of past—the distant past of heritage, the near past of experience, and the past-in-waiting. What they’ve got up there in the Blue—what your wife wants, what our parents wanted—is a future.”
“If we go up north,” my father asked, “will you come with us?”