A Separate Country

by Robert Hicks

  CHAPTER 11

  Anna Marie Hood

  I sometimes walked out to the levee where the cannoneers fired their guns each night to ward off the miasma and the fever. I brought them bonbons as I’d once brought them to the runaways in the swamp as a child. You must remember this, Lydia. I brought you with me many times, and now I regret it. I regret having scared you, and I know I did. The men at the cannons were rowdy and wore uncombed, curling beards. The colonel in charge of the battery wore his nut-brown uniform as if he had a grudge against it, twisted and wrinkled and shoved beneath his belt here and there. The colonel stepped lightly around the cannons and appeared afraid of them. He did not join the others in shouting hurrah with each fusillade. He looked pained.

  The noise was suffocating, heavy, and lingered on long after the dirty yellow flame shot out the end of the tube. There were no cannonballs, only sound and fire. Even so, we all watched out over the water for the effect of the shots to become apparent. What effect could there be? I didn’t understand the theory of the cannons, how they could stop the disease from calling on our houses and in our public rooms, how the smoke and fire could dampen the bright, hot fevers. Regardless, the cannoneers had ringed the city and each night a dozen guns blasted forth, sounding in every direction. We looked out at the mist above the brown water and above it to the slip of clouds that snuck past the moon. We expected to see something. The sound of the cannons made you cry, Lydia. You held your perfect little hands over your perfect little ears and you cried out for me. You grabbed at me, you took my skirt in your fists and looked up to me for help and explanation. All I could tell you was that this was the world, and in it men died and men fought death, much like you fought sleep at night from your trundle bed. This fight was loud and ugly and waged by men who burped and drank and leered at your mother. These are our heroes, I told you there, standing on the levee watching the cannon rock back in its carriage. I had no business telling you that. This world you must discover for yourself, and in your searching you may find that the better world of your soul, in which there is only truth, contains no such ugliness and despair. This is not what your mother discovered, but you may discover it still. It’s not what I saw when I watched the men pull their fraying lanyards and let loose the explosion. It was not what I saw when I imagined the disease wafting in on river winds, pushing back our cannons and armies and superstitions. I saw faces in the mists, gargoyles and demons, so sad and brutal and resigned. I didn’t tell you that, thank God. I spared you something at least.

  I suppose one might call my interest in the cannoneers an obsession. I thought of it as my own enlistment in the war, my contribution. The men thought I was for sale, I’m sure, and they grabbed at me when their prim colonel wasn’t watching. I didn’t acknowledge their fumblings, and later they quit trying. I never told them I was Mrs. Hood. The last time I visited the cannons I overheard one young, skinny cannoneer with syphilitic eyes. She’s got no sense, he said. She believes in this, sure enough, and if that ain’t sign of the galloping crazy, there ain’t nothing crazy. And I know that ain’t true. I missed those boys when I retreated back to the house in shame and for good, just in time for the birth of the epidemic.

  People began dying in late May. You could tell because the streets emptied of all but the clock-clock-clock of cart teams pulling their dead-heavy loads, and the cassocked priests hurrying up one street and down the other, from sick house to cemetery to funeral Mass, a thin-lipped and endless parade of piety and grim faith.

  Paschal might have died that summer had he lived to see it. I asked myself many times while chasing after you children and boiling your potatoes whether I would have felt the same way about Paschal if he’d died pale, dry, and afire in a comfortable bed, rather than at the end of a rope held by strange men in the dark. Would I have felt the same anger, remorse, and dread had the miasma taken him? If Paschal had died at the hands of God, pushed down by the contagion, His own inscrutable messenger? Had that been the cause of Paschal’s death, I would have blamed God. I would have avoided Mass and refused the Eucharist. But who did I have to blame but myself? I had led Paschal to his sacrifice, and I had watched it proceed. God had not arranged it. Or, if He had, I had been His willing accomplice, His conduit. I had to accept the blame. I could have resisted. Yes, I might have resisted even God. Instead, he disappeared by my doing and penance had to be paid.

  I began with you children. You were innocents who had no need to know of their mother’s fall, and who did not deserve to suffer from it. Alas, I believe you did suffer. I removed you from the world and set you on hard wooden chairs in the parlor like so many porcelain dolls propped up and staring at me. I had emptied the house of every other adult but me. This was not the mother you had known, but then I was not the Anna Marie I had known. I could do all, solve every problem, sing every nonsense song, polish every fork to its last tine, cosset my children in discipline, answer every question, and be loved again. I saw the wonder and anxiety in your eyes. I noticed that Anna Bell no longer carved her letters in the plaster walls of the room she shared with the twins, Marion and Lilian. I saw Ethel trying to cook a gombo z’herbes in the fireplace as the cook used to do it, though my little daughter had never picked up a pot except to beat it with a spoon or to hold toads captive.

  Finally, there was quiet. You all played silently in your rooms. All I could hear was the wind in the windowsill cracks and the groaning of the floors as they settled, always settling. This silence drove me out of the house. I was so drunk with my own ideas about blame and sin and death, when I left I didn’t think I’d done anything notable once I’d locked the doors from the outside and shut you all in. As long as nothing can get in or out, all will remain unchanged and as if I’d never left. I think I believed time would stop, otherwise I never would have left you all alone, invulnerable to the future so long as the doors were locked. Perhaps you were safer, really; safe from me. Did I tell you when I would return? I don’t think I did. I didn’t know myself, truly. I saw Duncan pressed up against the glass window in the parlor, watching me. He looked relieved, his face slack and open, eyes bright. It is only now, as I write this, that I see the tragedy in his face, which was the face of a son glad to see his mother go away.

  I would never be right again, I thought, if I didn’t face the fact that I had helped to kill my friend. More than that, I had to admit that this friend, this man who had been part of my history since I was a vain and adventurous young girl, this colored man had been an utter mystery to me. I knew nothing about him, nothing about how he had lived in the convent orphanage, nothing about the family that had abandoned him, nothing of what he did when he was not with us making jokes and playing the piano. I grieved for that man, but also for my own cold heart.

  I vowed to change, and to change I had to understand. I had to understand Paschal, and Michel and Rintrah and John. Myself too. How ignorant I felt.

  CHAPTER 12

  John Bell Hood

  The mark of the Devil on me, as Sebastien had put it all those years before, was cowardice. What terrible outbursts of cruelty and horror have been committed by man in the interest of concealing that terrible secret, our cowardice. From the moment we crawled out of our caves on our bellies in the dirt, seeking fire and foraging roots and insects, man had been plagued by cowardice. Left to our cowardice and its power to consume, we would have starved happily in the dark, chalking our names on cave walls. But cowardice must be beat down and concealed, and it is by the transmission of fear, the distribution of it from one man to another, that this cowardice is most effectively muted, though never truly overcome. This is what I think, anyway.

  I was afraid to fail Anna Marie, and yet I knew the insurance business had been a foolish idea. I had no head for such business, and yet I sought it out anyway, damn the fear. Now it was failing.

  I was afraid of the men who governed the city, and so I became a knee-walking sycophant around them, currying favor down at the Pickwick Club, listening to my voice
pitch higher only to be swallowed up in their thick blue carpets and red curtains.

  Long before that night at the ball I had become an anonymous man, rarely referred to as the General except by men with mischief in their eyes. I was a simperer, a sniveler. I depended on the charity of other men, my new business partners and the men who might give me their business. This trust was misplaced, my dependence a disaster. I lived in fear of what men thought of me, and so I continued to write my letters and to re-create the battles of my youth, searching for that unalloyed courage I thought I’d find in my past, some evidence for it.

  But I was not a courageous man, and so how could it be that I should be called upon to silence that howl, the cry of the Comanche and the damned? How could I think it would ever cease to ring in my head, that wail of outrage. And yet I began the task. I fought it. In the days after the ball I became deathly tired of it, the howl, and I knew I couldn’t live with it anymore. This is what General Longstreet had meant when he’d called it the weight. I had to put it off, stop it. I set out to silence it. I set out to become a man again, which is to say, a human.

  There was much to overcome. I was a streetcar man, cramped morning and night between broad shoulders. The city passed by cloudy windows, it was soft and beckoning. I knew it was neither, that it was hard as most places and perversely cruel, but it was also Anna Marie’s home, and when the facts of the city stand against the allure of that woman, I can’t count the smokers blowing their choking, decomposing clouds into the air of the streetcar, or the flower sellers drumming their product without cease or subtlety, or the mumbling and lost people staring after us as we passed. As long as Anna Marie was somewhere in the city (currently at her parents’ house for a long visit) and my platoon of children, the city was brilliant and I its master. There were no lynchings, no old enemies.

  Had that only been true. I was a master of nothing, a bearded and dour troll with a dead history and a future in hot-air schemes and greed. In the mornings I stepped off the streetcar, tossed a coin to Plato once he’d shined my shoes on his old lemon box, and walked over to the office on Common Street. Most days it was Plato, sweating, knock-toothed, and black as swamp water, whose conversation, irrational and soothing and confident, saved me from the grim fear of failure during those moments I had on Common Street before entering my cursed office rooms. All other conversations during the day would be disappointing or humiliating.

  “Shine it right up, General?”

  Someone might have told him about me, but more likely the title was merely one of several he used with his customers. Others were “colonel,” “captain,” “duke,” and “marquis,” the latter reserved for other negroes. He fit us each with titles he believed appropriate to the man, and I took some pleasure at the thought that he’d picked me for a general merely on the way I appeared. I had supped at the finest tables of Richmond, courted the loveliest flowers of the Confederacy, and been the confidant of President Jeff Davis himself, and yet it is the shoe-shine man I think about now, the one man who owed me nothing, who had nothing to gain from me but a coin or two.

  “Thank you, Plato.”

  “Gone off to make you some money today, right, General?”

  “As much as any day.”

  Plato was smarter than I had at first believed, much to my discredit. “No sir, today’s it. Today is the big day, I see it. Smell it. Can’t mistake the sign, got to march on off down there and take it when it comes, ’cause it coming.”

  “What signs?”

  “You still here, ain’t you? Every day, there you are. Ain’t dead yet, so the Lord got plans for you. And the Lord likes a man who got patience. A man who does his work every day. A man who humble. Not like the rest of this city, everyone spending they hours figuring what they gone do next, someday, once they’s got around to it. The clouds are looking good for you, too.”

  “You read signs in the clouds?”

  “Nah, just saying that shine gone stay on you all day. No rain to run it off. It gone be a pretty day. A moneymaking day.”

  It was never a moneymaking day. There were money-hoping days, and money-needing days, and money-promising days. I hung my hat on the hat stand every morning, sat at my desk in the quiet corner of the big wood room, and listened to my partners tiptoe around behind me. On the blotter I laid one piece of paper every morning. On this paper, engraved with my initials, I would write another of hundreds of letters to the men I had once known when I was a commander and a warrior. I had to force myself to pick up the pen and write the first words, clever and dignified words. But however I worded it, the letters always said this:

  April 5, 1887

  Help me. Let me insure your cotton, your boats. Give me your money. I know no one. Once, you favored me, perhaps admired me. Now I find myself unsuited for everything respectable, and unable to make my way in the business as I once made my way across battlefields. I know nothing and am uncomfortable in all things now. I depend on the kindness of old friends and whatever dim memory of loyalty from long ago. Have pity.

  My partners whispered to each other and mewled at me. They were rarely in the office, always out soliciting business. They had many meetings. I was naïve. But not so naïve that I couldn’t be pushed to anger. On that April day, I began to end my suffering and humiliation.

  Felix was alone when he finally arrived, and God knows where Alcée was. In the late afternoon, the sun through the windows melted orange on the cypress floor. I had been writing letters all day but had just run out of ink. My mind wandered, spiraled down. I became angry.

  “Felix?”

  “Yes?”

  “Felix, why are you and Alcée always whispering? What is it I may not hear?”

  “Nothing, General, for you to worry about. Minor matters, clerical details.”

  “It has been clerical details that have marked every loss, every penny of mine that disappeared somewhere into those wharfs, and so I do not consider them minor. Tell me.”

  Felix was tall, stooped, and sallow. He paid a disturbing amount of attention to his mustache, black and gleaming and thrust ahead of a bony face and sunken cheeks. His jacket was too broad for his shoulders, the waist of his pants too loose.

  “We discuss how to run off with your money, of course!” He grinned and I frowned. “A joke, General, a joke.”

  Why did these men, Felix and his friend, Alcée—built fat, short, and fidgety like a beetle—think they could joke with me? What had I ever done to encourage that? I knew jokes, and could laugh, but not with such men, and at my own expense. I demand respect, but I am not without humor. Humor. Laughter. Innocence. I understand it.

  Oh hell, I was without humor. I am without humor. Who is this man writing on this page? So weak, so ingratiating, so worried. I do not recognize him. I should have broken the skinny one’s neck. He had stolen from me, I was sure of it, but there I was, negotiating with the bastard, listening to his joking barbs. Filthy Creole, no doubt a fornicator and possibly a sodomite. God had struck him down, and would continue to strike him down. Why else would he look like a man already dead, bones awaiting their tossing into some great common grave for the worthless. Or into the river. I was humorless, yes.

  I wanted to eat his heart, remove his eyes, cut him in two. My hand ached where the arrow had marked me. I had tied my lot to this man, this goblin. I had been weak.

  I took him by the front of his shirt and pulled him down to the floor by my chair so I could look into his eyes. His eyes were nearly black, and I thought I detected fright. This fed me, made me bolder. I slapped him and he cried out. He tried to get to his feet and I pulled him down again. I am still strong, I thought. He waited for another blow, eyes closed, but I held back. I savored the look of anticipation in his face. He was terrified, and I had terrified him. Good.

  “Do not ever take a liberty with me. Not again. You won’t do it again.”

  One end of his mustache had found its way into his mouth. He tried to spit it out while keeping an eye on me. Th
e moment could not last, but for now he was mine. I could feel my leg growing back, I could feel the muscles again. Power flowed back into my arm, my muscles grew taut and whole. I nearly jumped to my feet. Foot. I thought better of it. But I knew I still had power, that I could command a man to sit on his knees before me.

  I wondered if I could kill Felix, who remained quiet and kneeling during my reverie. He breathed heavily, a thin and whiny rasp wrenching from his chest. He watched me, and in his eyes I could see the fear had passed and all that remained was puzzlement and growing impatience. I swept my good arm across my desk, sending papers and glassware to the floor. The letter I had been writing (May I be forgiven the imposition, friend…) fluttered down between my feet. I must have seemed insane.

  “General, this is not necessary. I was merely making a joke, a bad one, yes, but still a joke.”

  “Is it a joke that we have no money, that we are believed fools in every lounge and club up and down this city?”

  “I do not know this. Who speaks of this?”

  “Liar.”

  “Perhaps it is only the jealous who speak this way.”

  “Jealous of what, for God’s sake? Perhaps it is only me they speak of.”

  Felix’s eyes narrowed to nothing. He was not stupid, nor was he entirely without courage.