A Separate Country

by Robert Hicks

  Nuns tended to the afflicted, who raised up a ruckus of coughs and hacks and shouts and moans that were like an evil choir. We must have been taking too long at the entrance, because soon there was a man behind shouting for us to get out of the way. We split on either side of the path and watched a slope-shouldered bald man and his young, stout-armed, and glassy-eyed partner carry in two people who looked like skeletons already. They drooled out their mouths and looked at us without blinking, and I started to jump forward to wipe their chins when Houdou John stopped me.

  “Don’t touch. Yellow jack, or scarlet fever, or cholera, or some damned thing, anyways you don’t want none of it. These folks come to die.”

  “Why here?”

  “The nuns will take care of them until they gone.”

  “And what about kin?”

  “Kin? They got no kin. Those who got people, they don’t end up here. They die quiet in nice rooms, in they houses back behind walls and curtains. You don’t never see them until the hearse comes.”

  Around the side of the building I could hear men hammering and sawing. Reckon they was making boxes ready for when the moaning stopped.

  “We all just as likely to end up here as these poor souls. Anytime. You got negroes here, you got white people over there, don’t make no difference. Not here, at least.”

  “Every fella dies one time or another.”

  “Not like this. You tell me who deserves dying like this?”

  “No idea.”

  “No one. And that’s what General Hood and Father Mike are trying to change, and you just nearly killed the man. Now, you can leave me now or you can come with me to see Father Mike. He’s got work for you.”

  I just nodded, and without thinking about it, I kept following him. We turned back to leave, and I looked back over the patients on either side of me, and noticed how the gaslight threw streams of light and shadows across the gasping choir of expiring souls, and one of them in the light caught my eye and raised up. I know you, I know you!

  I told him he didn’t and we left.

  That night I met the giant priest Michel, called Father Mike. He scolded me like a child and I let him do it because he held a iron sledge in his hand like it were a twig and it don’t do to cross men like that.

  “So here’s the thing, young’un. What’s your name?”

  “Abraham Lincoln.”

  “You’re breathing well for a dead man.”

  I didn’t say anything. He went on, ignoring my sarcasm.

  “I dislike the constabulary very much, had my own affairs with them in my youth and would not willingly send any man off to the Calaboose. Now, the General wants your head, but he’ll calm down and see the wisdom of what I’m proposing. I’m guessing, knowing who the General is, and you being a right anonymous young fellow, that you got something from the hoary past you want to take up with the General, and my guess is it’s the war. Easy guess, of course. So first, I need to know, can you live in this city and not raise a hand to Hood or his family?”

  The battlefield at Franklin, its crop of the dead. And then: Just a crippled old man rolling around in the mud. Nothing to get from any of it.

  “I can.”

  “Then I suppose that, being a priest, I should extend charity even unto my enemy.”

  “Thanks.”

  “It’s not as if we haven’t all thought of doing the same thing to the man,” the priest added.

  * * *

  And that’s when I was marched down to the big house of a little dwarf and introduced to Rintrah King. To the big white Spanish house on Chartres with its neat courtyard lined with lovingly trimmed banana trees and palms.

  “Do not laugh at him, Abe,” said the priest, who still didn’t know my name. “I am myself afraid of him, and I’m afraid of no one else except God.” Men apparently under this dwarf’s command flitted here and there on business that I could tell, after growing up an orphan among the saloonkeepers and hustlers of the Mississippi, was nothing straight or legal. Not my business, I didn’t ask. The dwarf and the priest huddled in a dark passageway, and I heard the dwarf laugh. “No, he didn’t, really? By God, I could use a man like that.” The priest shushed him and scolded him. Then they walked over to where I stood beneath a brass wall sconce filigreed in a wrapping vine like muscadine. The dwarf sized me up and asked me if I knew cards. The priest interrupted.

  “Not this one, no, he doesn’t, Rintrah.”

  “Looks like he might. Got those eyes. Bet he’s got some cards in his pocket.”

  I did.

  “This one needs to get right, if you understand my meaning, Rintrah.”

  “Oh, so this is church business, is it, Father Mike?”

  “It’s my business, and I ain’t sending him to the Calaboose. I could make it church business, though,” he said, looking around with big eyes, taking in all the activity. “How do you think you would hold up against the bishop, my friend? What you got going now, liquor? Liquor it is. Ah, and there goes the boxes of tobacco. Tax-free, I assume? I could have this place seized and reopened as a convent in a week.”

  The little man shrugged, as if he had a thousand young cardsharps at his command, losing one wasn’t much of a worry. He looked at me steady this time.

  “All right then, Father Mike, my friend since you yourself were a thug and a fornicator, out of my love for you, we’ll send him down to Henri Rouart’s ice-making monstrosity. He come up here last week wanting a favor, which I did for him, and now it’s his turn. What’s your name?”

  “Eli Griffin.” I told it straight before I had a chance to think.

  “Eli Griffin, you go on down and report to Monsieur Rouart, who is a degenerate gambler and owes me money, and tell him that you have a job in his iceworks. And what’s more, I want you to tell me what the hell he’s got going down there, it sounds like one hell of a money racket if you ask me. Now git.”

  Rouart was a handsome and silent man, nearly always in a stovepipe. His big bushy eyebrows pushed out ahead of him. When I reported to his factory—a low-slung building on the tracks with what looked like a smokestack poking out the top—he just sighed and waved me over to the others, Italians and Germans bundled up like it was Canada, slicing big slabs of ice formed on iron pipes that ran floor to ceiling. I nearly froze my ass off that day.

  Afterward, once I’d got a coat and the hang of the work, I realized that there was no better place to be in New Orleans than among the pipes and the sawdust and the pallets of ice blocks. The ice that formed on the pipes were like something natural, it was the forest of an ice kingdom, or the jagged formations of an ice cave. The light that came in through the windows was spare and filtered, but it didn’t matter because the ice itself seemed to give off its own light.

  And it was cold in there, when the rest of the city was hammered down with the heat. Wisps of mist flew up off our bodies whenever we moved. I wasn’t the only one who saw this as something to recommend the factory. Rintrah came to visit sometimes. I had a chair I liked to sit in, on the north side of the big ice room, where I could sit and watch the ice form when I wasn’t cutting it and shaping it and sliding it down toward the pallets and the sawdust. Rintrah would come, ask me if I’d figured out how much Rouart was making, and whether Rintrah could get in on the business, I’d tell him no, he’d curse me, and then we’d sit talking about the heat and women.

  My other visitor came at first with Rintrah, but then came on his own nearly every day. General Hood nearly never said a word, except to describe what he thought he could see on the pipes. Bears, rows of corn, the face of Sherman, angels. He never once mentioned our first meeting, which I assumed was Father Mike’s doing. Part of his penance, I reckon, to suffer in silence and to love his enemy. He would unstrap his leg, lean it against his chair, and let his head loll back. After a while, it got so he’d stay for nearly two hours, and during that time I’d have to get up and cut ice, leaving him alone. There were times I’d pass by a row of pipes and see him at the other
end, talking to himself. He was always calm and friendly when he left. He said the cold made his leg feel better. The ice factory was another world, entirely separate from the place outside, and knowing there’s a place like that, a place you can get to sometimes, can give a man some confidence. That’s what I thought, at least.

  It was right odd for me to have General John Bell Hood sitting next to me. He didn’t come only for the ice. He came for me, I’m sure of that now, now that he’s handed his book, his confession, into my hands for safekeeping. He knew who I was, where I had come from, and what I had thought of him, and why I had done what I’d done. He came and sat next to me, day after day, giving me every opportunity to ask him questions, to insult him, to curse him. Instead, after a while I began visiting him at his house, doing odd jobs. I think he liked me around to remind him of something he didn’t ever want to forget.

  Still, Rintrah didn’t trust me, not even with Hood dead. He didn’t believe in such stories, which was perhaps why he is the last one alive, and the most miserable.

  CHAPTER 5

  From the Journals of Anna Marie Hood

  I decided to paint John only a month after we began courting, and once I’d begun we became a family scandal. I piled sketches of ears upon obsessive studies in shade for his eyes, the hollows of his cheeks, the crevasses of his forehead. I drew his lips ten times, which even I will admit was excessive.

  John never understood the fuss, but he worried at my mother’s outraged whispers that drifted into the parlor from the dining room. “It is not proper for a young lady to stare at a man’s face so closely, not even after marriage,” she said, whenever she knew we could hear her but not see her. Sound traveled peculiarly, clearly, between the two rooms though they were separated by a hall. Of course she knew this.

  “I’m sure you will tell me how it is improper,” my father said, barely bothering to whisper. He was no doubt reading the City Item, which would disintegrate in his wet, salty hands before the evening was out.

  “It is too intimate.”

  “So is the streetcar.” Father had given up hope I would find a different man, and now that he’d made his peace he seemed to want the whole thing over immediately. If he could have married us himself right then—me with paint on my fingers, John dripping in his black vented suit—he would have done it, I was sure.

  “I am not joking with you, Duncan. Look at those lips!”

  “Which do you mean?”

  “His!”

  “The ones on the paper or the ones on the man? Dare I be so intimate?”

  “All of them. No, don’t look. What are they doing?”

  I heard the door to the dining room open and I could picture my father’s white head and red nose, each gigantic, poking around the corner. John could see him from where he sat, and he nodded his head as if in shame.

  “Don’t move,” I said.

  “Your father is staring at me. It’s not natural. This is very strange.”

  “Yes, they are fascinated by you. Now please stop talking or I shall paint your mouth wide open like an idiot’s.”

  John nodded again at my father and turned back toward my easel. My father shut the door behind him and I heard my mother muffled against his chest as he carried her away into the garden.

  “Why would you want to paint me? There are far more beautiful things, Anna Marie, as I’m sure you know.”

  Perhaps there were. But when the day came that we owned our own bed and knew each other’s bodies as husband and wife, I was afraid there would be no time to watch his face so closely, to take down in my mind every pockmark and iris fleck and turn of his ear and the slow downward drift of his big eyes. I imagined much movement, I imagined frenzy and weight and great huffing and pleading sighs, and then some part of him would be lost to me forever. I would never see his face, his withered arm, that head, his chest, in quite the same way as I saw them now, when they were untouched and shrouded. Now I could see the man who had captured me, who had made me love him. Afterward, after we had joined our bodies and—yes, I know the word, Lydia; it is a good English word, you should learn it and never use it—he would break through, he would be too close for me to see him as I did now. I didn’t want to forget the first John I knew.

  In truth, painting a man is as erotic as my mother suspected. That was another reason why we sat there in the parlor, two arm’s lengths away from each other. I stared and consumed him, I put him on a canvas.

  I was an artist, before there came all the children, and then there was no room for my easel and no time for mixing paints. I was nearly unschooled, but I had talent. It is not so strange, I think. I began painting almost immediately after the afternoon with the old painter who had hoped to seduce me and who had never put paint to the canvas. I remember thinking that I would prove myself better than him, and so I would make something good out of such a tawdry afternoon. But that’s not it, that’s not why I painted and that’s not why I kept painting. I painted because, like the old man in his tiny apartment, I wanted to see people as they are without the coverings. I had no interest in landscapes, especially the landscape of the city, all smoke and horses. Studies of fruit were colorful and terribly boring. So I painted faces, usually from memory. At first I rode the streetcar and stared, and then I went home and drew those faces on some of my father’s linen stationery I’d stolen from his desk. I drew with pencil and also pieces of charcoal I took from the fireplace and wrapped in a piece of my old baptism dress, holed out by moths. I worked in the dark of the carriage shed behind the house, and when my mother asked me about the black beneath my fingernails, I told her I had been in the garden weeding her rose mallow, or pinching off and pruning back the vines of her moonflower. I should have known that these obvious lies—I loved flowers but had never once helped my mother in the garden—would cause my capture. One day I was sitting in the old carriage shed sketching the lopsided face of a young and buxom chambermaid, who had been sitting that day next to a nun on the streetcar and had stared at the religious woman in fear and longing. I intended to sketch the nun’s face next, the pleased face of a person who knows she’s being stared at. I was so engrossed I didn’t notice that Mother had followed me, that she had watched me, and that when she’d seen enough, she marched into the shed. She seized up my pad and I nearly smacked her before realizing who she was. She marched back into the house calling for Father. I stayed in the carriage shed, dreading the verdict.

  The verdict was that I should draw and paint on proper canvases, with proper pencils and paints, and cease immediately the sneaking around and stealing charcoal. It was not the behavior of a lady, and it also became clear that my parents loved art. I hadn’t known it from the awful cartoons and faded sketches of Roman ruins that hung about the house, or the way they’d hung the portrait of Grandfather, the great judge, in the kitchen pantry next to the dried beans, flour, and lard. I was not to become a painter, of course, but merely a lady of talent. “There is nothing wrong with that, Anna Marie,” Mother said. “Better than having no talent, mmmm? Or the wrong talents? There will be no laying about cafés with unkempt men, of course. You shall paint in the parlor.”

  John was the first person I painted from life and not memory. At first I kept starting and stopping, finally stabbing my brush at the canvas. He tried to smile, a smile that was slow and agonizing like a great limb cracking. I think he thought I was nervous, and once he stood up and walked toward me, assuring me that this painting wasn’t necessary if he made me uncomfortable. “You needn’t fiddle with nature, Anna Marie, and you shouldn’t worry about insulting me. You couldn’t.”

  “Sit down, I can’t paint you like that.” He was standing in front of my easel, scrupulous about not peeking at the canvas, his palms turned up and gently thrust toward me, as if he were giving me something. Permission not to paint him, I suppose. He shrugged and sat back down.

  It wasn’t any nervousness that had frustrated me. It was the idea of painting someone living. He moved, his eyes gaz
ed at me as long as he could stand it and then shot downward, his eyelids blinked, his neck flexed, his whole body seemed to vibrate. He was a man, a person, how was I to paint him? He moved. Everything moved on him, if I looked close enough I might have seen the blood running to and fro. I didn’t know how to paint a person in motion. My memories had never moved, they had not thrummed like this.

  The painting is outside your bedroom now, Lydia. It’s the one you call Daddy Under Glass. I admit that he looks a bit like he’s been trapped, his eyes agog. Somehow I managed to paint those big hands not upturned in offering, as I saw them that day we began, but raised at me as if to push against the canvas from the other side. It’s a kind face, though, and that first night we had met he had said that kindness was rare. Here, I thought, here is kindness in your face, John. I wonder if that surprised him. The lips are right, I know that much, and the luxuriant sweep of gray beard, that’s all correct. The way your father’s neck descends into muscle at the shoulder, the vast breadth of his chest, that’s all correct also. Your father said he loved it and insisted I keep it. Mother was amused by it. “You’ve really captured his likeness,” she said, happy and so very proud of her cultured daughter. She even forgave me for blackening the piece of my ruined baptism dress with the charcoal. When she thought I wasn’t looking she folded it carefully and slipped it into the pocket of her apron. “So glad it is of some good use still,” she said, nearly warbling, stroking my hair. Father admired the brushwork.

  It’s a horrible painting, of course, and yet I believe that John loved it and I love it too. It’s the first thing we made together, before we made you children.

  I don’t think of that picture when I am near him now, or when I am dreaming of him. I have ten thousand others, a million others, that I memorized during those days of staring into his face, and I was able to sneak those out of the house without Mother knowing. By the end of the sitting, John quit posing and simply watched me, especially my eyes. He watched my eyes and my hands, and once in a while he would touch his nose or his forehead to tell me about my paint smudges. I believe he made his own pictures during those days. This scared me at first, as he himself scared me. He was a man who had seen the unnatural deaths of men at the hands of other men, and had made a profession of it. What could he possibly see in the face of a woman who had spent the war riding horses and taking piano lessons? A few dozen city blocks were the compass of my world. He made me shy and hopeful, he made me want to follow him out into the world, battened down in sea storms and riding horses through the Caucasus, or whatever one would do with a man who had no fear. Of course he had fear, as much as most of us and more than some. Maybe the painting isn’t so wrong after all. Only later did I see that in his face, and also the love and longing. He hadn’t been beaten, it seemed to me, but he had been whipped. The thing most people have seen in his eyes is exhaustion. I’d say that was right. He told me he wanted to put down his load. He wanted to sit beside me, he wanted me to sit beside him, and across that parlor and in the center of my world, I saw love and admiration and lust in the eyes. A strong man for whom I was both a mystery and a respite. I didn’t paint that of course, but a few weeks later we were engaged to be married. Draw your own conclusions, darling.