A Separate Country

by Robert Hicks

  I made my great mistake then.

  “He is a gentleman, that’s why. He’s graceful and you’re a monster.”

  Michel turned to me, puzzled and surprised. I knew then that he hadn’t expected an answer, or that I would make his path clear.

  “Graceful? We’ll see, mademoiselle.”

  He gently pushed Paschal to the ground, keeping his big mutton hand pressed against the poor boy’s chest. He stared into Paschal, a curious frown on his face, as if he weren’t sure what would happen next.

  “Why, you’re a colored boy.”

  Rintrah groaned and was motionless. I slapped Michel once, twice, three times, but I was alone, and when he told me to sit I obeyed. He turned back to Paschal, who watched him closely and without apprehension, as if he knew what was to happen but would be damned if he would enlighten Michel. He didn’t struggle. Michel took his right foot and twisted it around as if winding a clock. Slowly, as if unwilling. Paschal tried to flip onto his stomach, to relieve the pressure, but Michel stopped him with his boot. Paschal watched, not saying a word. Michel put that boot to the twisted knee and stepped down. The knee popped and the leg went loose, detached. Paschal screamed silently and endlessly. The great O of his mouth might have swallowed us all.

  I screamed, too, only my scream sounded out, deafening, piercing the rotted air and coursing through branch and leaf. Michel laid Paschal’s leg down and sat heavily on the log beside me. I spit on him and he didn’t wipe it off. He watched Paschal, who could not move. The pain pinned him there, I guessed, between the cypress knees and below the dark. His breath was quick and exploded from him, but he did not scream. He cried, silently.

  Rintrah gathered himself and crawled over to Paschal. Paschal closed his eyes and fainted. I got up to run and Michel held me. He watched Rintrah, who ran his hand over his friend’s leg, his forehead, his arm. He went into one of their bags and pulled out a bladder of water, which he poured over Pascal’s head and into his mouth. He moved the ruined leg and Paschal’s hand shot out and throttled him until he let go. Rintrah turned to us and stared, crouched on his haunches, running his hands through his thin hair.

  They were hog-tied to each other from that moment on. Michel knew it, he knew it as he sat holding me roughly by the arm and returning Rintrah’s stare. They spoke silently to each other, in the language of orphans. Who did they have to come rescue them, to fix them, to set them on the right path? Who would tell them what to do, who gave a damn? Michel was an orphan of sorts. The great bear, the tumescent beast, drunk and pawing, had grown up in a lean-to outside his parents’ house.

  “You didn’t come out to see him, did you?” Michel said, not looking at me.

  “No. Not at first.”

  “You came to help him. Them.”

  “Yes.” He scared me. I thought we would all be killed, perhaps. We had to be killed now, he’d committed a crime, we were witnesses. Michel and I had been children together, but that had no meaning anymore. Not children now. He had seen something in Paschal at the last moment, even before maiming him. He had recognized something, but it wasn’t enough to stop him. Now he laid his great head in his hands and wept.

  I watched Rintrah pick up the rock and didn’t stop him. I didn’t watch, either. I heard the dull thud, the swallowed cry, and the slow crackle of the bush behind us collapsing under Michel’s weight.

  Now we were two. Rintrah told me to sit still, not to move, and that he would get the horse. He stumbled off, cursing all of us. I found a long, straight piece of an oak branch, and I began to bind Paschal’s leg with strips of cloth torn from the clothes in his bag. He woke three times to shout at me, each time passing out from the effort. I felt his strong, long leg beneath his trousers, another perfection, and this only made me sadder. Michel had ruined something beautiful.

  “Don’t tie the bindings so tight on him.”

  Michel was on his hands and knees, shaking his head as if to fling something from it. Mud and rotted leaves clung to the back of his head, his hands.

  “I think you shouldn’t tell me what to do anymore, Michel. You’re mad. You’re evil.”

  “Perhaps, but I know that if you tie it too tight he’ll lose the leg.”

  “And wasn’t that your intention? Why should I trust you now?” I loosened the bindings even so.

  “Don’t know what my intention was. I was angry. Natural.” He paused and dropped his head so it kissed the ground. “Natural, Lord.”

  Rintrah came back, stomping through the clearing. No horse. He jumped upon seeing Michel and raised his fists. Michel nodded his head.

  “Hit me, yes. I deserve it.”

  “You deserve worse.”

  Off to our right, in a clearing surrounding some open water, I saw the flash of two white egrets lifting off from the edge of their domain and flying bent-necked into branches high above. They were only flashes of white in starlight, bright and then gray and then gone. They were imperfections of the dark, denying it while absorbed in it. The woods opened, every shadow possessed a light, in every direction there was a way out. Then the light went down and closed each way in turn, until I was back again with the three boys, Michel apologizing to Rintrah and Rintrah circling him, spitting insults.

  “Will you all please, s’il vous plait, quit gabbling and carry me out of here?” Paschal’s voice came through gasps. “I can’t stay here. I shall die.”

  Rintrah walked over and tried to help him up, but it was impossible.

  “We’re not going to get away, are we, Paschal?”

  “No, I don’t think so, brother, not now.”

  Without a word Michel got to his feet, picked the boy up tenderly, and laid him across his shoulders. He was gentle and spared Paschal every bump and stumble, always supporting the leg he had just snapped. I didn’t know why he cared so suddenly about the other boy’s pain. He mumbled to himself, and occasionally the breeze carried back bits of prayer, the familiar Latin lilt of the dimly lit altar, the comfort of the priest’s dark and murmuring box. He had so much to confess, it was true, but I’m still not certain why that confession began at that moment in those woods. He had done worse in his short life. He had beaten and stabbed men twice his age, he had waded into bars swinging his fists in every direction, if the rumors were true. He was all instinct and fire and power and sinew, a rage. He had always lashed out, though, at those he thought mocked him or took advantage of him. Perhaps now he’d seen how close he had come to the murder of an innocent, the mortal sin. I never found out, and he never volunteered the story of his epiphany. Paschal and Rintrah never talked about it either.

  He said to Paschal, over and over again, “I’ll get you there. I’ll get you there….”

  I carried their orphanage bags, and Rintrah got the pork and the sweets. We followed behind and talked shyly. They had run away from the orphanage because they, the oldest boys, were to be signed over by the end of the week to merchant ships as apprentice seamen. They had grown up together, the two oddities: one dwarf, one nameless colored boy. They called each other brother and meant it. They’d thought they could run someplace else, far out of New Orleans, and live a different life. They had planned their escape for weeks, afraid that if they weren’t smart they’d be found and dragooned by the merchant captains. Rintrah was particularly afraid of what he would become on board a ship. What they gonna do with me? I ain’t no toy, ain’t gonna be a toy of any kind. They’d picked that day as their one chance, and but for meeting me, they would have spent the next day slipping through the swamp and up the bayou until they were far from the city, and then they would have gone north. Maybe Chicago, Rintrah said, where the cattle lined the streets and a man could hide and make something of himself without always being gawked at.

  That was over. We marched them back into the city.

  Michel carried Paschal to the church and handed him over to the priests and nuns, who kept him out of the orphanage and tended him. Michel said he’d found him fallen out of a tree, and Paschal
never said otherwise.

  A week later Michel walked into St. Louis Cathedral, barged into the bishop’s office, got on his knees, and prayed loudly for the blessing of the vocation. The bishop, no small man himself, slapped Michel across the face and Michel smiled. This is what he told me years later. What I know for sure is he didn’t throw the bishop through the narrow, gray window of his office chamber, that the bishop took him on as his special project, that after some years Michel became Father Mike, and that Father Mike never quit paying for the sin he committed that night in the swamp.

  I didn’t, either, now that I think about it. Always paying for that now. I’m glad of it. Yes, I am.

  Neither Paschal nor Rintrah left the city again. Michel left it only briefly, to attend Assumption Seminary down in Bayou Lafourche, but he quickly returned. I went to France to study, and there I was finished, as they say of girls like me. When I returned I returned for good, and before meeting your father, the only three people I cared for in this city were the boys who had fought in the swamp that day.

  I tell you this because I want you to know that your dear maman was not always surrounded by children, not always bien souffrante, not always waddling about bearing her belly before her like a great round shield. I was not always this way, the boundaries of the world were not always the gates of the General’s house. I saw and remembered everything. I did not know then how to fix a cough or calm a fever, but I could dance.

  The General. John. I shall call him that here. He’s John whenever we are out of your hearing. John. The General John Bell Hood, leader of men, stung and maimed by men, abandoned by men. That was the General when I met him.

  He makes much of that first ball. He tried to dance with my cousin’s friend, but he slipped just as they were to turn and pass. He caught himself with the cane he had hung over his arm, paused, and escorted the girl, a flitting little bird, back to her seat with my cousin. He bowed low to her and said nothing. He carried the war with him like a ratty coat that invokes both pity and silence. The silence, I think, drove him crazy. I suppose he thought that after all that he had done, all that he had suffered, that he would be thanked, at least forgiven his strangeness and his deformities. It took him some time to understand that he would never be thanked in the way he hoped, with genuine love, and that deformity would be pitied but not forgiven. No one thanks the executioner, they wish he would stay out of sight. The cripples too.

  He knew this, but who can resist a dance? A ball is a great pretending, an imagined thing. All ladies are beautiful, all men are gracious and handsome, all flowers are fresh and all music is perfect. It is a beastly lie. A ball is a fantasy dreamed up and populated by humans, and humans are hard even when they pretend they aren’t. They spin and glide and tell themselves wonderful stories, but their feet don’t ever leave the ground. I’ve looked.

  Mother would have said that the man was lost, meaning lost to us, not to himself, what he thought of himself was of little importance. He was not dead, he had merely never been born, and anyway, I was not raised to cavort (that would have been her word for it) with men so rough and so awkward. I was to concern myself only with men of possibility, who understood the subtle ways of the Creole world and who knew how to dress themselves and pick out flowers and avoid death at duel. I’m sure such men bored her as much as they bored me, and certainly my father was no such man. But your father was the exception, he was a different sort of américain. He was too large and grand for the Creoles, but he was a man of consequence. He was grand! And yes he was rough, but he could be trained! Remember that. The training he took! She and I were very much alike, though she would not admit it.

  I think I haven’t described John as I saw him, only as the others saw him, and as Mother would have seen him. But I saw him, too, and I watched closely. I saw a man who went off to sit by himself and watch us dance, shunned from the conversation, and who seemed to accept that fate. He was used to it, he accepted it, and yet there was more to it than that. He watched the bodies twirling by, the flying blooms of purple and yellow brushing the floor, and he seemed to take pleasure in our happiness and in our beauty, even if he seemed to possess none of his own. He smiled slightly and drew his shoulders in humbly and looked up at us. I stopped dancing and stood near my cousin, whose billowing dress hid me while I spied on him. He tapped his cane to the music, a fiddled quadrille, and made himself small. He moved to the dark corner of the settee in the foyer where few could see him. He watched and he watched. Later he told me that a reviled man could not take for granted the moments of otherwise forbidden beauties, and so he didn’t think of himself as ill-treated, but mostly blessed. Sad and blessed. Someday you will know people like that, the sad and the blessed, and they will be saints or they will be thieves. Possibly some of both.

  That night I left my cousin to her talk of chivalry and rare blue African fabrics and walked over to John. It was a dream, I didn’t know I was walking until I was halfway there. I heard my cousin call out to me but I knew that if I turned or stopped I would never make it, I would turn back and end my life old and draped in black lace, nattering on with my cousin as always, probably about our disappointing grandchildren. I wondered if my mother had felt the same way when she took the big paw of Duncan Hennen. Get me away, that’s what I thought.

  He watched me walk toward him, and when I came close he struggled to his feet, pressing hard on his cane. I didn’t know then that he had lost a leg.

  “Thank you,” he said. Those were the first words between us.

  “For what?”

  “For being kind. It’s not common, you know.”

  “How do you know I’m being kind?” I sat down at the other end of the settee and swept the gathered folds of my pink dress close to me. We sat pressed against our ends of the settee, as if each thought the other contagious.

  “Because the woman over there, the one staring with her mouth dropped open, she looks like you. The one you were standing behind. She watched you come over here, and I don’t think you saw this, but she took a couple steps. To stop you. If you’re here to make a joke of me, then she’s not in on the joke, and if I’m not missing my mark, she appears to be exactly the type of person who would love a joke on a cripple. So you’re not here to amuse your friends. Also, you’re looking me in the eye, and kind people do that.”

  I was. But God, his eyes! They were not the blue you see in the eyes of men. They were wet and deep and clear, the blue of the sky reflected in a clear creek. There were clouds in them too. I should be forgiven for looking him in the eye, though it was not demure or proper.

  “I am not making a joke of you, you’re right. I’m not sure why I would, what is there to have fun about with you? Are you famous?”

  He could only move one of his arms properly. The other hung at his side, bent permanently. He draped his good arm over the back of the settee and leaned toward me. Now the eyes were darker blue. They changed shade, I swear it!

  “Not famous enough, obviously.”

  That arm was powerful, his chest was broad, his face was long. And that beard, that silly old beard. I thought it made him look old, like an old billy goat. I could not see his mouth, only the mustache moving. He was a man, not like the fops. He was a foreign creature and mesmerizing. I forgot about my cousin.

  “But you should not assume I’m being kind, either.”

  “I choose to assume it anyway.”

  “I am not kind.”

  “I assume it because otherwise there would be no hope for this party, and because I want you to be kind. To me, if that’s not too forward.”

  I heard a shout from the entrance to the ballroom, the scrape and clang of men with canes and swords, but it was soon washed away in the ocean roar of the blood rushing to the tips of my ears and, I assumed, the tops of my cheeks. I could feel the heat there. Good Lord, I thought, who is this man?

  “And your name, sir? I require the names of the men to whom I extend that sort of charity.” I was trying to parry, but my
wit had fled me. It was good that he did not appear to hear me. He had stood again, looking toward the door.

  “Please excuse me, Miss Hennen, I shall return in a moment.”

  He knew my name. Of course he did. He was not a creature of this world. I watched him limp quickly to the door, where a man in a uniform, a Federal officer, was trying to gain entrance. His way had been barred by two young men, one of whom I knew had fought in the late war. Swords were half unsheathed when John got there.

  I didn’t hear what he said. But I could see that when he spoke all three of them listened intently. His face flushed and looked angry, but he kept his voice too low for anyone else to hear. Some of the dancers stopped to watch, or to join in, but when he looked up at them stone-eyed they beat a retreat and spun around the dance floor again, looking glad to be out of his way. The three who had been on the point of a fight straightened while he talked, and sheathed their swords. They looked down like little boys caught fooling with Papa’s guns. He dismissed the two Creoles and took the uniformed man aside. Always talking, never allowing an interruption. Finally the man nodded his head, saluted, and stepped out into the night. By now the news of the near battle had spread and the music had quieted for a moment. People watched as John walked back. Back to me, I realized of a sudden. Then they watched me, too, and my cousin let her mouth drop open and tried to mouth something to me I couldn’t make out. He sat down at his end of the settee again, in the dark. He spoke.

  “You asked me something before, Miss Hennen.”

  “Who are you?”

  “John Hood.”

  “That’s all, John Hood?”

  He looked back toward the doorway and sighed.

  “General John Bell Hood, of the late Confederate States of America.”

  I slid closer to him so I could hear properly, and I didn’t care what my nattering cousin thought.

  “They knew you.”

  “Yes they did.”

  “So you are famous enough.”