“I’m not sure, to be honest,” I said. “I had…I had these directions. But I don’t know—if you don’t mind me asking, have you lived here a long time? I mean, before the plague?”
His mild cheerfulness suddenly turned to suspicion, and I regretted bringing up the Reunification Plague in a part of the country where brash young men still wear shirts bearing stylized, blacked-out profiles of Julia Templestowe’s head.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Benjamin Chestnut.”
“Well goddamn,” he said. “All these years I thought Mama was out of her mind. Come in, come in.”
He led me into the house. In the living room, an old woman was seated on a decrepit couch, listening to old love songs. She was frail and thin, a wheelchair parked by her side.
“Mama, you got a visitor,” the man said. “It’s the one you talked about all those years. This is Benjamin Chestnut.”
For a moment she eyed me as though I were an apparition. She covered her face with her hands.
“I was sure I’d die before you came,” she said.
The old woman sent her son to fetch us drinks and called me to sit next to her on the couch. She touched my face as though she knew me. But I didn’t recognize her at all.
“It’s there,” she said. “I can see it. It’s faint, but you got some of her in you.”
“I’m not going to lie to you,” I said. “I don’t know who you are, and I don’t know why I’m here.”
She laughed. “I think that’s the way she wanted it.”
The old woman shook my hand. “My name is Layla Denomme Jr.,” she said. “I knew your aunt Sarat, a very long time ago. She used to come by the bar my mother ran in the old Augusta port, back before you were born.”
Her son returned with a pitcher of lemonade. “I’m sorry for what I said all those years, Mama,” he said. “You were right, I guess.”
She shooed him away. “C’mon,” she said to me. “Might as well show you what you’re here for.”
Her son tried to help her up but she told him to go back outside and clean the gutters. She picked a walking stick off of her wheelchair and motioned me to follow her out the kitchen door.
We came to a storm shelter built into the ground. The wood on the door had once been painted red, but had flaked away now to almost nothing. A padlock held the doors in place. The old woman wore a necklace on which hung the key. She gave it to me.
“Go on, then,” she said. “They’re your property, now. She willed them to you.”
I opened the door. Sunlight flooded the storm shelter. I saw my aunt’s old paper diaries stacked neatly on the ground below.
“There are two dozen of them in all,” the old woman said. “I gave her my word that I wouldn’t lose them, and I wouldn’t read them. And on both counts I kept my word.”
I stared at the books. A memory of them slathered in dirt within my mother’s greenhouse suddenly came up like nausea. I was afraid I’d be sick where I stood.
“All these years, you held on to them,” I said.
“That’s right,” the old woman replied.
“Why? Why would you help her like that, and for so long?”
“Why?” she echoed, bemused. “Because it was the right thing to do.” She chuckled. “Sarat told me you were a sweet boy, Benjamin, but you must understand that in this part of the world, right and wrong ain’t about who wins, or who kills who. In this part of the world, right and wrong ain’t even about right and wrong. It’s about what you do for your own.”
She pointed to the west, out past the end of the property, where a few shacks and broken stables pockmarked an otherwise lifeless land. Dust swirled like cursive script under the sun.
“You know, three of the Georgia delegates to the Reunification Ceremony were from these parts,” she said. “A few days after they came home, half the town was sick. That’s why you don’t see much of anything round here these days: plague came through and killed more people here than just about anywhere else in the South outside Atlanta.”
She tapped the storm shelter door with her walking stick. “We lived in that little hole, Billy’s father and I, for eighteen months,” she said. “Lived off canned food, relieved ourselves in a little makeshift bucket we carried out once a week in the dead of night. Almost two whole years like that, until there were too many dead here for the sickness to keep moving.”
“Jesus,” I said. “That must have been hell.”
“That’s right,” the old woman replied. “And we were the only ones from around here who survived, because we were the only ones who drove to every store from here to three towns over, buying every last can of beans and bottle of water we could find; preparing for it.”
It took me a moment to realize what she meant.
“Even a cruel favor is still a favor,” the old woman said, “and I repay what I owe. But now you have to take this burden from me. A woman can’t die in peace, carrying a secret that big.”
THAT WINTER, I rented a small cabin by the lake in Nelchina. It was there I read the diaries, and it was there I wrote this.
During that winter I learned about the place where the Chestnuts first lived. I learned how my grandmother and my father and my aunts had fled their home. I learned what the women in black had meant when they said my father had been tested in Patience.
And I learned what had been done to her and what she’d done. In Patience, in Halfway Branch, in that floating prison in the Florida Sea. I learned about the day they’d drowned her, and the day that strange foreign man came to our farm and offered her the means to drown them back.
By the time I’d finished reading, there were no more means of escape, no more means of delusion. Laid bare on the page was the truth of it: she was not some accessory or accomplice. It was her that did it.
That was her last act of cowardice, all those decades later: forcing me to understand her, forcing me to choose what to do with the secret.
So I chose.
On the day I had finally taken from them all there was to take, I piled the diaries in a pyre and set them ablaze. If I had wanted to, I could have sold them for a criminal sum to one of the many wealthy history buffs who collect civil war memorabilia. I could have donated them anonymously to a museum, or to the Civil War Archive Project or to the Committee for Truth and Reunification. But I couldn’t keep myself from burning them. It was the only way I had left to hurt her.
SHE’S ALMOST GONE from me now. I’ve lived to be older than she was, older than my parents. But sometimes I still think about what she must have seen in the days after she gave me away, when she finally set foot in the Blue country.
On her way to Columbus she would have driven along the great Sunbelt highway, the road glimmering like a sheet of diamonds—past metropolises packed with the children and grandchildren of the original inland pilgrims. She would have seen the huge looming billboards commemorating Reunification, some of them vandalized with graffiti—the letters “KAR” painted big and blue—by angry Northerners who still believed the South was getting away with it all too easy.
I imagine her among the crowd at the Reunification Day Ceremony, silently wheeling herself to the site of the grand parade, the poison radiating from her hulking frame. The crowd would have parted to let her through—they would have seen her torture scars and her shaven head and her hunchbacked spine and they would have felt pity.
I remember once, when we were swimming in the Savannah, she tried to hold her breath underwater. I sat by the bank and timed her, counting the seconds as best I could. From the size of her, I imagined she would spend an eternity submerged. But her lungs were weak and quickly she surfaced.
As she sucked in the air, I saw a look on her face I’d never seen before. It was relief, as though she’d spent not a few seconds, but an entire lifetime suffocating, and was now finally free.
I wonder, sometimes, if that’s the way she must have felt the moment she put the poison inside her and readied to wheel herself into Reunification Square—an overwhelming relief, the opposite of drowning.