A Separate Country

by Robert Hicks

  The only other thing John said to me about that painting, besides describing his admiration for it—a terrible lie!—was that it made certain things clear to him.

  “I must live up to it now,” he said, leaving on the last day of his sitting, when I’d finally turned it around for his inspection. “That is the face of a different man.”

  I thought he was insulting the painting, or making a joke. Later, I knew he was talking about himself. He would have to become the different man. It was not easy, Lydia, it surely was not. Not for any of us. We assume that when a person sets out to change their life, that person is setting out to change it for the better. I’m not so sure anymore. Or, rather, I’m not sure it’s possible to know how you’ll come out when you start mucking around with your life. And the hard part isn’t the setting off, the hard part isn’t the beginning.

  You’re old enough, Lydia, possibly you’ve noticed. We’ve both changed, and the worst of that transformation has only recently come to pass. This is the lie of that painting I made, or at least of the folly of painting it and thinking it would be him, my John, perfectly captured. No one, no one real, stays still for very long. Memory stays put, it patiently remains in place while we hang ornaments from it and dress it in finery. But flesh and blood moves, it never stops. Flesh and blood is naked, it is constantly falling and scarring and breaking and getting dirty and picking itself back up. This was true of me no less than of John. I suppose that’s what I should tell you about now.

  I pray we are through the worst of it. I am too tired now to think. Your little sister is crying, she wants food.

  CHAPTER 6

  John Bell Hood

  How many times did I carry her off to our rooms? One hundred times for every child? Two hundred times for each of the eleven? It would be a low estimate. I didn’t have relations with Anna Marie so much as I dug into her flesh, merged with the heat and musky sweat of her, became greater than human rather than less so, as I was in the daytime as an incomplete gargoyle bearing forth only shadows where parts of a man had once belonged. She was pale and smooth, and the muscles in her back stood out as twin ropes descending, flexed in her arch upon me, arms behind her head, her knees dug into my sides. I needed only to imagine that curved back, the arch, the stretch of her arms behind her head, the rough nipples on my tongue, the heat and rankness of her, and off we would go upstairs. Nine months later, a child. Or twins.

  Ten years of that, of lying on my back immobile, was the vantage from which I watched the years wrench devilry and lust and joy from her face, to be replaced by duty and exhaustion and distraction. And always I was on my back, unable to take charge of her as a whole man might. After the seventh child, we began sleeping in separate bedrooms.

  I came home when it suited me. I kept a cot in my offices for those nights when, having spent hours bent over the maps of old battles, I collapsed and slept, dreaming of messengers and the clank of camp spoons. On those maps I arrayed gravel and river stones for the troops, matchsticks for fortifications, golden pen nibs for commanders. I pushed them here and there, wanting to see the battle again, to hear it and smell it. Never broke through, though. Around me I kept the letters from my correspondents spread over the floor and upon the desk, in the chairs. I stalked from one letter to the next, peering down at them and their reports. We moved into an enfillading position, but lacked support from the front, and thus could not press the advantage as they were able to wheel toward us on their flank without risk…. I barely understood that talk anymore, that language. Why did you not just kill them? That is what I mumbled to myself sometimes, shouting it other times. Your job was to kill, not to save men!

  Could I have talked to Anna Marie about my work, my memoirs? I could have, but I would not. She was a woman. More important, I suppose, she was my wife and I did not want my wife to think I was insane.

  Nor did I want her to know what I spent my days doing. When I came home in our third year of marriage and told her that I would be closing the cotton business, I led her to believe that I had been cheated of my rightful business by unscrupulous men, that my partners were dullards, and that had I just another six months we would have been rich on the Tennessee cotton I’d recently cornered in the market.

  In short, I didn’t want her to suspect the truth. We had failed because I did not bother to lick the boots of the Creole men who controlled the wharf, nor had I stooped to beg business from my former colleagues, the politicians and farmers who still remembered the Gallant Hood. Of course, it was not begging and it was specifically why I had been brought into the firm in the first place. Yes, I had cornered a market in West Tennessee cotton, but only because I was one of the few cotton men unaware that flooding had been worse than usual in the flat country around Memphis, and that the cotton I had purchased was worthless for anything other than the making of nuns’ habits and paupers’ rags. The truth was that my partners had left me in disgust. They were right to do it, though I hated them.

  It was months before I admitted that failure. I stayed late every night, tracing my fingers along the meridians of my failures, where the lives of men had ended. In the hallway on one of those nights I could hear the negro housekeepers sweeping and shining and talking.

  “The crippled man, he work hard.”

  “Not like them fancy men, not like a Creole.”

  “Not like a white Creole.”

  “Not like any Creole, you know it.”

  “True, true. Yep.”

  “Work like an American. Building things.”

  “A cripple building things. Strange days. And he look like he washed up with the Ark.”

  “Older than he is.”

  “How old is he?”

  “Don’t know, just old.”

  “Ain’t never take a drink that I seen.”

  “Ain’t never seen a woman up in here neither.”

  “He got a cot.”

  “Too small for two, though.”

  I put my maps away for the night and folded up the letters. I went home to Anna Marie, to the unfathomable gabble of children in my house. I had become unspeakably sad as the voices of the negro dust sweepers faded down the hallway. They would have known about the flood. I went home to tell Anna Marie of my failure.

  I wasn’t a failure long, praise the White League, that ragged, unseemly collection of bullies and paranoids.

  They came to all of us, all the Confederate generals living there in the teeming swamp city: Beauregard, Early, Hooker, Longstreet, and Hood. Where do you stand? they asked. By which they meant: You, who spilled blood in the war over these very same matters, what will you do now that the city is occupied again, and the victors rule, and the negroes run for office in their brand-new suits?

  We all made our vague promises, our assurances of solidarity, all worth spit. Every one of us was afraid of arousing the anger of the Federals, who might charge us with crimes, possibly treason. Who knew? General Longstreet, though, could not help but engage the question posed by the White League: What will you do? I’d been around him since serving in Texas, and I knew him to be a principled cuss likely to martyr himself for the pleasure of it, the pleasure of setting a righteous fire to yourself.

  Not long after the White League had approached us, the Daily City Item published Longstreet’s letter exhorting the good people of New Orleans and South Louisiana to not merely accept Federal rule and occupation, but to welcome it in the true and proper posture of the vanquished, which is in obedience and servility to the victors who had, after all, proven the superiority of their will and their culture and their cause by mule-whipping us on the field of battle. The rules of war dictated our submission to our conquerors. It was the only honorable position.

  Six months later, after his utter shunning, he came to me. His insurance business, the Insurance Association of America, would shortly fail, he said, because of the boycott. I was not surprised, though I acted so. He seemed pleased by this, perversely.

  He said, “John, I trust you, and
I would like you to take over the insurance business and save it.”

  “I couldn’t,” I said, knowing that I could.

  “You must, you are not tainted as I, and you have that family.”

  When he said tainted, and declared me clear of any taint, I briefly wanted nothing more than to be so tainted. But I agreed to assume the ownership of his business for a nominal charge.

  When Longstreet walked out our front door that last time, he turned and said, “I feel light, John, for the first time in many years. Do you know what I mean by that? Do you feel the weight ever? I reckon a general might give up his command, but it’s a whole lot harder to shrug off that cursed weight of it and its history. I’ve been years with it, and now it’s gone. Strange.”

  I did know that weight. I kept it in my office, on my shelves, with the maps and the letters. I smiled and waved good-bye to the general.

  This is what Rintrah said to me when he found out I had launched into the insurance business.

  “Don’t fuck up this one, too, General, or you’ll hear from me.”

  “Hear from you?” I bit into one of his tangerines and slobbered on his hat. “And what do you mean, ‘this one, too’?”

  Rintrah wiped his hat and charged me three cents.

  “I know everything, John, and I especially know the failures. I have an ear for it, a touch. I can feel failure wobbling the street and vibrating the banquette. It is a very useful skill, there’s money in failure if you know where to find it. And so of course I know how your cotton business failed, General.”

  “And why should I care what you know?” I had only recently learned of his childhood friendship with Anna Marie.

  “Because you would not only hear from me if you fail that woman again, our Anna Marie, but you would have to reckon with Father Mike.”

  A dwarf and a priest. It was the beginning of a bawdy joke, not a threat.

  “Father who?”

  Rintrah arranged a meeting in the cold and strange wonderland of Mr. Rouart’s ice factory, and that was how I was introduced to another of Anna Marie’s friends, a giant and hairy priest named Michel, called Father Mike by those who knew him best. After meeting him, had I been told he’d risen fully formed from the rotting leaves and tea-dark water of the backswamp, I would not have been surprised.

  Father Mike’s beard iced up while I watched. He was some ancient beast of the far north, picking at the white frost of his breath and gabbling on about women and liquor and his nearly erotic love for the Virgin, whom he merely referred to as Mother. We ate cold chicken while Rintrah and the priest related their stories of Anna Marie’s childhood, which they described as nearly feral. I think this was wishful thinking. Those two were the feral ones, or at least primitives. Hunks of chicken flew from their mouths and seemed to freeze in the air, clattering to the floor. (I believe I’m inventing that, but it conveys the truth of what I remember, anyway. They had poor manners.)

  This Father Mike wore a bowler and the overalls of a stonemason. A fine gray dust covered him from head to toe, except where the chicken grease had absorbed it and darkened his mouth, his fingers, his chin. In the dim light of the factory, shrouded in gray, he might have been a being coughed up out of the dark, a prophet of the icy dark, if not for the fact that he swore and blasphemed with great enthusiasm.

  “Why are you dressed as a mason?” I asked, bored.

  “I am building a chapel and a cemetery.”

  “Doesn’t seem a priestly occupation. Aren’t you supposed to be slinging smoke around on chains and performing the black magic or whatever it is you do with those crackers?”

  “What do you know of a priestly occupation?” he asked kindly. He threw a chicken bone at one of Mr. Rouart’s ice-covered condenser towers and it stuck fast.

  “Don’t know much, I suppose.”

  “Do you know St. Geneviève?”

  “No.”

  “She’s the great intercessor on our behalf during times of affliction. Such as when one loses a leg.”

  “And she grows the leg back?”

  He stomped out in a huff, upending his chair and sending it crashing against the far wall, apparently without his noticing. Rintrah glared at me, grabbed Father Mike’s hat, and went chasing after. When he returned, he read me riot.

  “You can think of something better to do when afflicted than praying?” he spat.

  “No.” I was ashamed of myself. Perhaps I was jealous of that great, powerful giant who spoke of my wife with a familiarity I myself didn’t know.

  “My first instruction to you, General, as you try again to make something of yourself in the business of this city, is this: don’t insult the Catholics.”

  “I didn’t mean…”

  “Of course you did. Give me his chicken.”

  To make amends, I began giving Father Mike a little money for his chapel, here and there when I was flush, and I have to say that I began to enjoy watching the stone worked into figures and altars, the chapel rising as if it had always been there latent in the soil. And Father Mike himself grew on me, though it would be a long time before we were friendly.

  When Anna Marie discovered I’d met Father Mike, I saw relief pass across her face. She eyed me warily, for a moment, I suppose wondering what he might have told me, but when it was clear that she still had her good reputation in the eyes of her husband, she smiled.

  “Why have I not met this man, your friend?”

  She shrugged her shoulders and walked away toward the kitchen, where the cook was braising ducks.

  “I didn’t think you cared to know them, John. They are the past and this—” She swept her hands about her, taking in the muddy footprints, the precisely sorted collections of dead snails, the dolls missing the stuffing from their arms, the smudged and scratched furniture, the black shoe marks on the walls. “This, darling, is the future!”

  There was something wrong about that answer and I knew it immediately, I just couldn’t say what it was. There was something missing, in both the stories Father Mike and Rintrah had told, and in Anna Marie’s casual dismissal of the subject. Something missing, something absent.

  Only much later would I realize that it was a person who was missing, someone dear to all three who, nonetheless, they would not talk about. And when I discovered this person’s existence, ten years later, it would be too late.

  CHAPTER 7

  Anna Marie Hood

  Paschal had taught me to fish. He said it was a survival skill he had inherited by blood. He meant his negro blood. Then he would laugh and watch me run the hook under the shiner’s spine.

  I think you were seven years old when we spent the last summer at your grandparents’ fish camp across the lake. They called it The Fish Camp, but it was something more of a small rusticated compound suited for half a dozen families who required that their food be cooked fresh and served daily by permanent staff. There were changing rooms on the beach, and shade for hammocks, and we spent two months there that last year while the city burned with fever.

  That summer I showed you and John Junior how to fish. Or, rather, I showed you how I fished; your father showed you his way, which involved chicken gizzards and elaborate floating apparatuses made of driftwood. He was an uplander, I suppose that’s how they fished in Kentucky. He didn’t fish with shiners, but Paschal had shown me how to gather the weighted net in my right hand, line in my left, and spin it out onto the water so that it blossomed before it splashed down upon the water and sank down into the dark to trap the little bait fish. It occurs to me now that John couldn’t cast a bait net. His bad arm wouldn’t have allowed it. It’s odd I am only thinking of that now, years later. At the time I thought only that he was obstinate.

  We spent that long summer with my my cousin Henriette, her fiancé Gustave, and my parents. My brothers and sisters had scattered to their own retreats, though occasionally they’d ride over to play cards. Only the Hoods ever went fishing at the fish camp. The others tittered and shouted and dove into
the hot water of the lake when they couldn’t bear the heat in their hammocks any longer. Henriette read Tom Jones to her fiancé and I could hear her giggles across the beach and up the creek all the way to the bald spot along the bank where you and John Junior and your father and I dangled our feet high above the black water. We caught red fishes and white fishes and black fishes, and I don’t remember any of their names. Your father knew them. He brought them back for the servants to eat, since no one at our table would eat anything that hadn’t been hunted or gathered by professionals and shipped in boxes from the best traders in the city. At supper I could smell our fish being fried back in the kitchen, and through the window across from my seat, past my cousin’s bouncing head, I could see the back stoop where the negroes ate the fish straight out of the skillet and nodded their heads slowly, without speaking. It looked delicious, but I never asked them to serve it to me, I never asked them to fry something up for me or any of you. There were rules.