A Separate Country

by Robert Hicks

  “Famous isn’t quite the right word.”

  “Respected.”

  “Feared is another way of putting it.”

  Could a man be so arrogant as to think that men feared him, and also be gentle and grateful that someone had walked across the floor to sit with him? He was either two men or one man of two worlds. I could see this in the way he hid his mangled arm from me and snuck glances at the door, on watch for the other, the harder thing, the one that had maimed him and plunked him down in a dark corner of a bright and perfumed ballroom. He looked at me and his face sagged and relaxed, as if he had just shifted a great weight. I knew that one of the men in John Bell Hood, or one of his worlds, would not hold on much longer. May it be the other one that dies, I thought, and not the soft and funny man I imagined he contained within, the kind man, the man of nearly childlike enthusiasms and hopes I believed was sitting on the settee with me. I had prayed to meet such a person, but I hadn’t thought he would be so strange.

  After the ball he came to court me. Father, a big man with perfect olive skin who wore ties with perfect knots, was nonplussed by the man. He had been trained to be skeptical of the américains, you see, though they were not such different men. Here, on his doorstep, was a general, a commander of men, large and wire-haired and thick and wounded, asking after his daughter. Father always gave John a good cigar, but left him to snip the ends himself, which was difficult because of John’s ruined left arm. Father noticed, but let him struggle anyway. I’m not sure if this was cruel or respectful.

  My parents had known since I was a girl that I’d do what I wanted to do whether I had their blessing or not, so they gave John and me permission to be seen together in public. In public, where their army of aunts and servants and cousins and friends moved about and made their notes. Had John and I been forced to meet on the sly, in the dark, in the underworld of the city where there was music and drink and places to kiss under great spreading figs in secret courtyards, my parents’ army of spies would have been lost, blind. In the daylight I wore my finest day dresses and maintained a respectable distance from John when we walked, down by the riverside and up Esplanade Avenue, then back down toward the market for tomatoes and oranges. I would not be denied the pleasure of a kiss under the fig tree, though, nor the thrill of disappearing into the dark with my man to see the riverboat men play for extra cash in the saloons where the colored girls sang. I would sneak out, tell lies, dress plain and dark like the servants who walked across the city to clean the houses of my people, all those coloreds and Irish and Germans. My parents wouldn’t have to know everything.

  When we’d been courting for a few weeks, I began to show him our streets. He had been a country child, and then a man who lived on horses and slept on the ground. I don’t know that he’d ever walked the streets of a city. Perhaps Richmond, but what was there to see there? He was embarrassed by his limp, but soon, after many months and miles along streets he could not pronounce, his leg became strong and he hardly wobbled on that wooden pin once he had a little speed.

  We met boys recruiting clients for the opium houses and others recruiting souls for the Church. They spoke French like Creoles and English like Irishmen.

  There was a dwarf, a fruit seller who also sold tips on the horse races, and this man became his friend. On the Rue Chartres we’d find him, wide-legged upon a fruit crate, pulling at his great mustache, greased and black, shouting about his pomegranates.

  A typical Saturday morning:

  “General! I’ve got oranges and I need the money.”

  “You dress better than I do, Rintrah.”

  “Yes, but who don’t, mate? Got nothing to do with wanting to be buried proper. Expenses gone up.”

  “Surely they would give you a discount, friend? A volume discount?”

  “I want a damned full-size coffin and a real grave marker. No one got to know my affliction when I’m dead. The marker don’t got to say, ‘Here is Rintrah, Who Could Walk Under Horses.’ I’ll be a man like any other. Now buy some oranges.”

  John enjoyed the moments with my little man, my friend. Rintrah looked every bit the gentleman down to his thin, delicate shoes. He wore black like a Creole and cocked his flat-top hat like an Irishman. Rintrah amazed and humbled John. He owned a house and carried a cane sword. He was not afraid, not to be seen nor to be threatened. He was strong. I know that John came to think of Rintrah as a superior, an example, a mentor. It was a measure of John’s foolishness and sadness that he, at least at first, thought his afflictions matched Rintrah’s.

  I had known Rintrah for many years. We are the closest of friends, though we hardly see each other, not as we did long ago. Our friendship was nearly impossible to explain, at least to someone so new and innocent like John. Yes, innocent! Perhaps the most innocent man I ever knew, about nearly everything but killing and war. I worked hard to shatter that innocence, but he was hard to conquer.

  At first I didn’t tell John about my past, and neither did Rintrah. There was no point to it. The little man had not always been such an upstanding merchant, an example to crippled generals, but how to explain this? Goodness, Rintrah was not upstanding then, when John met him, and he never would be. Rintrah had his reasons for this, of course. So, John was missing a leg, yes, and most of the use of an arm. But what had Rintrah missed? He was always the little man, unable to hide. He had been given the part of the world no one cared about, the life below the gaze, the space that was dirty and untended, scuffed by boots and clad in an unceasing course of stucco and mortar. Above, out of sight, hid the delicate filigree of gable carvings, iron twisted into flowers, the reaching and grasping hands of saints lifted up to the Lord on tapestries and high into colored windows. Rintrah had seen these things, of course: propped up on a chair, lifted onto someone’s shoulder, in a painting. The problem had not been that they were unattainable, but that they had not been meant for him. Nothing had, not out of spite but out of forgetfulness. The world of men forgot Rintrah. No one forgot the General, and it was the General’s world even if he limped and clunked down the banquette. John thought Rintrah’s hopes for death were jokes, the little man’s way of banter. I knew Rintrah longed for death, and also that he would never hasten it. The idea that he would miss something, not see something he might have seen had he been more patient, had sickened him his whole life. He would not willfully cut short the chance he would see something new. So he waited for death to come to him, and then there could be no regret. In the meantime, he ruled his bright corner of the demimonde, a far more powerful man than most people knew. Boys twice his size spent their days running his messages through the Vieux Carré, spitting tobacco all the way.

  I’m glad John came to enjoy his company. He was funny and interesting and watchful with Rintrah. John did not treat Rintrah as a curiosity. He silently bargained with the man that, if extended the same courtesy, he would treat Rintrah as a whole man unremarkable but for his wit. They would poke fun at each other, trade gossip, and part as men and not fellow cripples.

  “You might want to get your own self measured for a box, General. You never know when the demon coming. Never.”

  “As long as he doesn’t look like you, all is well.”

  “Can I have your leg when you go? I need to fix my banister.”

  Rintrah was but one of the landmarks of the street. I dragged John around to show him the city I had known. I told him I was merely offering the grand tour. The truth was that I wanted to be the one standing alongside him when he discovered the secret courtyards, the ecstatic rituals of death at Congo Square, the cabals of old warhorses endlessly plotting a French restoration while sipping liquor from small bottles at Maspero’s. I wanted to explain the beauty and refinement of the brothels, the domains of the exquisite octoroons. I wanted to bring him to the Ursulines so that he would know the nuns and not fear them. I wanted to explain the plagues and the floods so that he would know we were only tested, not punished. I wanted him to sit in the wet courtyards below the pa
lms and among the iron plants, hidden from sight and watching the sun carve its track across the unmarked sky. I wanted him to see and smell the swamp, to sense the miasma drifting out and among the town houses and cottages and American mansions, carrying threat and making us humble. I wanted him to see these things first, so I could explain. I wanted to explain. I wanted him to love it, filth and wonder and all, as I’d come to love it. I wanted him to stay so that I could stay beside him. I taught him a little French so that it would make sense when the old men cursed him on principle, for being American.

  Whether he fell in love with the city or me, you’ll have to ask him yourself. He stayed, whatever the reason, and we were married.

  Does the reason matter? It does not when I wake and the light through the tall windows draws little dark shadows in the crevasses of John’s muscular, broad shoulder and back. He stirs, the bed trembles, and I can hear the rough sheets of cotton drawing across his bare skin. It does not matter when I flush, listen to him breathe, and loosen the ties of my peignoir. He has not cured me of everything. I am a woman and he is a man. I have ten children, and that is the fact of me that shocks the society ladies most of all: not being pregnant, but their imagination of all those moments just before. I am now older, and I touch my husband. He stirs. The linen curtains push out the window in the breeze as if displaced by our breathing. His leg, where it was divided, is smooth as if polished. He is power and blue eyes. He absorbs me, releases me, annihilates me. When I was young I devoured him, he was a powerful man, your father, made more powerful and primal by his wounds, the absences in his body. I found myself thinking of his wounds when we were tangled up together and moving swiftly. I wondered who had fired the round that had severed his leg, and what he had thought lying on the field without it, and how it had felt once the pain had subsided. Did he feel lighter, did he feel any pleasure in the relief of that great pain? I felt pleasure, I certainly did, feeling him hot upon me. It was all so mysterious. Whatever had battered his shell, he was still ravenous. I blush to think of it. I was constantly with child. The strange heat of pregnancy smelted contentment, anger, misery, joy, and the nearly overwhelming desire to run away, and I gave in to urge after urge, mood after mood, desire after desire.

  May you be so absorbed someday, Lydia. And my Lord, may you be old when you read this! I would not mind if you made a religious vocation for yourself, but I do not want to drive you to it in horror.

  Cover your eyes, but I cannot censor this small tract. This pen will not allow it. I shall write one thing of use with it, and that thing shall be entirely mine and truthful. I refuse to leave behind only the whisper of my modest skirts in quiet salons, the fast-fading sound of my polite laughter at table, my string of worn rosary beads. I will leave one more thing, a thing that is only mine. Why do I write as if I am dying? We are all dying, but I shall live many more years to pester you, ma petite.

  I suppose it is the child I bear, the eleventh. Bearing a child is a little death. A part of me revolts and then abandons me. Or perhaps it is just very hot today.

  As I said before, you were born the day after our outing in the coupé, the day after that pinched old Creole nearly got beaten by John.

  I remember that it was still and gray, though it did not rain. Dr. Ardoin and two nurses stood by. John circled the house on foot, endlessly inspecting the plantings, always pausing beneath my window to listen before moving on. I watched for him while you slowly made your way into our world. Once, he carried a spray of asters, the next time round they were gone. You pierced me, Lydia, and filled my body with an ache that tightened and loosened until I felt no longer human. Only a vessel. I shouted out at last as your body slipped from me. I had been staring fixedly at a cobweb in the mullion of the window. John stopped and turned as if to crash through that window and save me. Then you began to scream, and the nurses began moving about urgently, and I could see that John was in a state. I prayed he would look at me, and he did. I smiled at him before leaning back to take the last of the clenching pain. When I looked back up, he had gone from the window.

  Later I heard him thumping around the hallway, and I asked Dr. Ardoin to let him in.

  I thought he would come to me then, but he didn’t. He went to you, Lydia, swaddled in your bassinet at the other end of the room. He unwrapped you and you cried out. He studied you, pink and blue and white, and he touched your toes. Then he wrapped you up and brought you to me. The nurses tried to stop him. He growled and they stepped back. I held you to my chest.

  “She’s all there,” he said.

  “You took an inventory?”

  “It seemed wise.”

  “And if she had been incomplete? Missing something?”

  He didn’t say anything. He looked down at us and stroked your tiny foot. It kept slipping out from the swaddling. The nurses were shocked by his behavior, his interest in an infant. Dr. Ardoin had already helped himself to the brandy and did not care about anything, certainly not propriety. The little drunk.

  John sat down.

  “I had not considered that a child of mine could be whole.”

  He didn’t hate himself, or what he had been, Lydia. He did not think that you would inherit his wounds, certainly not the physical ones. No, your father only thought, and always thought, he didn’t deserve what he had been given. He didn’t deserve you, he told me. He didn’t deserve me. This did not make him sad, he said, it was just a fact. But it was not a fact. There is no deserving, there is no explanation for the good that happens, any more than there is a good explanation for the bad. There is no logic. I reminded him of one of the first things that he had said to me: a reviled man could not take for granted the moments of otherwise forbidden beauties.

  “You don’t deserve it, John,” I said, suckling you. “You don’t deserve it, and none of the rest of us do either.” We are all like the reviled man, I said, blessed by beauty every once in a while for no good reason. “Don’t be a fool, and don’t ruin it with explanations. Come lie with us.” He laid that great, powerful body next to us, Lydia, and promptly fell asleep. He loved us, you know, and that’s enough for loving someone back. You don’t need more reason than that.

  When you were older, he loved to carry you on his shoulders so you could watch the ants in the magnolia blossoms and listen to the baby finches call out from the nest in the porch eaves.

  CHAPTER 4

  Eli Griffin

  I let a couple days pass by my window before deciding what I would do next. I lay in bed, or slumped in my bowed cane-back chair, and watched the clouds push in, roiling over each other like dogs at the hunt before disappearing past my window. I listened to the sound of Levi’s factory thumping and screeching below, and I listened for the yodeling of the fruit cart arabs who pulled their bananas and oranges and mangos through the streets below on the chase for the noontime trade. I listened for the ghost of Hood, the sound of hooves clattering and the scrape of a sword come swift out of its scabbard. That would be the sound of Hood’s spectre, if I believed in spectres, which I don’t.

  In my rooms there were now two new objects, each wrapped neatly in hemp twine: a stack of green ledgers, and a pile of thin writing paper, each page so thin that the black scrawl upon them seemed written on the sky when I held them up to the window. Two piles of paper, nearly equal in size, alone atop my thin-legged eating table, which I cleaned and oiled once a week. I’d made it myself out of barge wood, I was proud of it. I’d made most everything, and if I couldn’t make it, I usually didn’t want it. So there were no curtains on the windows and no rugs on the floor. No pictures on the walls, no trinkets on the windowsills, no mirrors. I had my books. The catechism and a worn-out Bible. A book of courtly love poetry that I detested but read anyway so I could understand the fops at the clubs, always on their airs and talking nonsense. Paradise Lost, which I read obsessively but only the parts I could understand, mostly the parts what talked about the agony of Satan the traitor. I read grammar books and dictionaries when I could
find them. I read City of God. I read what I thought would help me to burn away the Tennessee in me, the bumpkin in me, and make me into a lettered man, or at least one who sounded like he was lettered. I tried to talk different, and I tried to write things, though I was only half successful most of the time, I reckon, but I kept trying as I’d been trying since I’d arrived in New Orleans four years before, where no one knew or cared who Eli Griffin had been. I’d have killed the bastard who touched one of my books, which I kept neatly stacked on a shelf above the doorway.

  I cleaned the windows of my rooms with old cider vinegar and waxed the floors with candles I stole from saloons after everyone had gone down the liquor hole and become too stupid or blind to see me. I’d built a bed and stuffed feed bags full of stolen and scrounged cotton. I’d bought two pairs of blue denim work trousers, two thick white double-sided shirts that could be worn inside out, and two pairs of leather boots, of what animal I don’t know. I wore black suspenders always, and a black hat that sat low over my head, wide brim. I wore those clothes everywhere, I didn’t give a damn. The beautiful ladies in their fine silks, and the tailored men who paid for them, they could poke and titter at me all they wanted. My coin was still good and, you might imagine, I had saved a lot of it by living as something of a niggard. I kept the money behind a loose wallboard, stowed in an old wooden arm I’d bought off an old soldier, which I’d hollowed out. Pretty safe, I thought. I lived as if I had no intention of staying, and I had lived this way for years now.

  A lot of that money had come through the good graces of the one other object in the room, the deck of cards worn soft by use and stowed in their own zinc cigarette tin, whose hinges I oiled once a month.

  Now, though, those two piles of paper ruined everything. They tipped everything wrong, nothing seemed in its right place anymore.

  I knew what I’d been told to do, which was to go gallivanting around the city and countryside bearing loads of paper here, removing them there, searching out a man known to be a killer, and another man known to be a notorious Confederate general and leading citizen.