by Robert Hicks
At least some part of the truth.
The windows in the house had been locked shut and the air was dead. There was sweat in it, and something sharp like vinegar. The General’s clothes had been thrown over chairs and piled in doorways, like he’d been pacing the hall while dressing and undressing himself. Dust fairies blew around the sunbeams that slipped past the drawn curtains, and I thought of the times I’d seen little Lydia jumping to catch the dustlight in her hand.
Lydia. I stopped at her door and listened for a rasp of breath or the sound of sheets twisting. There was nothing, and when I pushed open the door it was dead black.
Then Lydia’s face lit up in the gray light from the doorway. Her eyes had stuck open just a little. She looked like she was waking up, but nothing moved. She looked strapped down. They say the dead let go of earthly burdens and become lighter, but I have never seen that. I had only seen them get real heavy. Lydia was dead and she was weighed down by it. Her face had gone white like a fairy’s.
If Mrs. Hood had been alive the house would have been under control. There would have been light and air. The other ten children would have been home, sitting quietly, praying for their sister and their father. Lydia would not have grown cold in her bed, alone. But the yellow jack had got Anna Marie, and the nine healthy children had been sent off. Hood and Lydia were all that remained, too sick to leave. They were the ruins of what Hood said was his own separate country. There had been enough Hoods for a country, or at least a small town, but that wasn’t what he’d meant and I ain’t figured it out.
I closed the door quietly, like I might wake Lydia up, and walked toward Hood’s room. I opened each door as I passed, and each window inside. By the time I reached Hood’s room, the air had shifted. I smelled jasmine, hot dirt, and boiled fish. The outdoors. Hood had fallen asleep with a smile on his face and his sheets gathered up tight in his big right fist. I opened the window in his room. The breeze woke him up.
“Where have you been, Mr. Griffin? I await your report.”
“My post is secure.” This was our standard greeting.
He said nothing, only stared up at the ceiling, where a lizard stalked a crazed mayfly. I searched around the room for a rag to wet, and finally tore off the bottom of his sheet. In the next room a washbasin still held some clear, cool water and I soaked it up. When I returned he had rolled on his side to face the window where a mockingbird shuddered and strutted and cocked its eye at him. I put the rag on his forehead and let the water drip down his face. I looked outside for someone to carry a message, but the street was empty. The neighborhood was empty, I knew: it was summer in New Orleans, and no one with any money stayed behind to face the yellow jack and floods and heat.
“Do you think I am humorous?” The General looked at me out the side of his eye. I wished he’d stayed asleep. I decided I wouldn’t tell him Lydia was dead. He was too close himself, he’d see his girl soon enough.
Humorous was not the first word I would have suggested, but there was some truth in it: Hood didn’t tell jokes, and he didn’t make silly faces, but he did enjoy talking foolishness behind that beard, and he knew the joke was that grave-damned face of his. Here was a dying man, a man who had lived his life as if cast in a Great Tragedy, the first man I had ever seen a mockingbird actually mock, and what he wanted to know was if he was funny. His face was soft and mournful. It was a serious question.
“Yes sir, I think you’re humorous.”
“I don’t think people know this about me. I should have told them.”
“Some people do. And you can’t tell people you’re funny, anyway. Otherwise they think you’re not funny for sure.”
“I have no time for paradox, but I will accept your judgment. Still, I want them to know this. Not that I’m funny. I am not funny. Dwarves and monkeys are funny.”
Not all dwarves are funny, I thought, and I believe he was thinking the same thing about the same person, our friend. It made him smile.
“Anna Marie knew it. She always did. She did not marry me for my countenance, my money, or my gentle good grace.”
I’d not thought much about why she had married him, some things being better not considered too hard. She had been a beautiful and educated woman who had studied in Paris with Frenchmen. She could ride a horse like a country-ass Acadian, paint like a man, and pray like a saint. If there were proper rules, I reckon that marriage would have been barred.
“Anna Marie thinks I am humorous.”
“Yes, she does.” Wherever she’s gone.
“She was the only one who wasn’t surprised to discover it.”
He turned back over and stared at me, as if sizing me up. His beard had twisted and matted into three thick strands.
“You received the letter. I had begun to think you hadn’t, or that you had ignored it.”
“Hard to ignore such a thing.”
“Staying away is easy. Staying out of strange business is what we do.”
“Maybe. Got no thought on it.”
“I thank you for coming.”
I didn’t say anything more. He blinked hard, fast. I could see his eyes spin up, like they were moving on their own, and I knew he was pushing back against the fire in his head, burning off the layers of his mind, twisting it, disordering it. I’d seen it too many times since getting to the city. Madness in those eyes. He fought it. He looked at me, straight and hard.
“I take it that, because you’re here, you accept the idea that you owe me?”
“I’m here because you asked me to be here.”
He shook his head. Sweaty hair stuck to the side of his face.
“No, no, it’s important that you realize you owe me. You are obliged to me. You cannot have honor until you have discharged your obligation.”
Fancy words, words you were supposed to obey. Words that could snuff a man’s life. I wanted to tell him I cared nothing about honor, and whether I had it or not. I’d meant to say it for years, but now a dying man lay before me. All things were sucked in by that man’s body and his voice, there was nothing else outside the walls of that room, the magnolia drooping in the sun outside the window was not real and was fading away. I could only nod my head at him.
He sucked in air and I heard the dry flapping rattle in his throat.
“You tried to kill me once, and now that I am dying and you are receiving your wish, you are obliged to make amends. This is truth, you can’t escape it, son.”
“It’s not my wish for you to die, General.”
He puffed up his yellowing cheeks and blew out. His mustache flapped slightly.
“Don’t try to confuse me with your paradoxes and feints, your false charges,” he said.
“I’m not.”
“I know you don’t want to kill me now.”
“That’s right.”
“But you must answer for your sin, like the rest of us.”
“Yes. I will, someday.”
“No, now. And you must see it that way, and not merely as a favor for an old man who may be abandoned once he’s in the grave.”
How he could talk, even on his deathbed.
“I see it, yessir,” I said.
He asked me to help him sit up, and so I grabbed him underneath the arms and pulled until his back leaned against the headboard. He was very light and too tall for the bed. He smiled at me.
“This is not only about your sin. It is mostly about my own. I must make sure it is destroyed, it and all the shoots and tendrils that have grown from my sin are withered. I’ve run out of time, you’ll have to finish. I have written a book, or at least part of one.”
He had been writing a book since I’d known him, but it weren’t about sin. It had been about war, the war, and it had been his one great task, his obsession. “The war memoirs.”
“No, not that book. I care nothing for that book anymore. It is a lie. Or, no, it was a true story built of lies I didn’t understand were lies until very late. Too late, really.”
He had spen
t years writing that war book. Ten years of his life working on it, writing his letters and analyzing his reports, putting together his great defense—that he had been right, and a great general. Most people who knew Hood knew of this book. There had been years in which it was all he had talked about, and there were hundreds of men in nearly every state and territory who could paper their houses with his letters: requests for information, for maps, for papers, for recollections, for assessments, for apologies. Sometimes he’d tell me about the book while we sat in the dripping dark of the ice factory. The old warmonger. He told me how perfectly true it was, how it would vindicate him, how it would make him a hero once again when all the world thought him a bloody-minded fool who had thrown his men upon certain death with as much concern as kindling upon a fire.
General John Bell Hood could go to Hell. But this man in the bed, I hadn’t thought of him as the General in a long time. He was just Hood now, called Papa by his children and John by his wife. I felt sorry for the man Hood, who had carried the deadweight of the General, part of his soul, all this time since the war.
The pieces of soul can’t be cut out without filling them up again, that’s a real law right there. God’s law. Can’t cut out the pieces any more than you can go around with a big hole in your gut. Got to be plugged up, replaced somehow. Hood wrote another book.
I stood watching the brown thrashers pecking and rattling in the weeds beyond the window, but all of that faded to nothing as he told me about his other book. The truth, he called it. The important story. He wouldn’t say what was in it, only that it was the thing he wanted to say to his children, and that it was not about the war.
“This book, the pages of this book, are in my library, Eli, though I’ve hidden some of it and forgotten where,” he said. “The other book, the war book, is in the possession of General P. G. T. Beauregard. You know of him?”
“Yes, of course.” He lived in one of the biggest houses of the old city and liked his drinks and his dancing girls. He was a hard man to miss.
“It has been suggested to me by an associate that you would be the proper person to take charge of this book, that you would do a fine job of seeing to its publication. There are problems with it, and you must overcome them. Grave problems. Beginning with this: I want you to get that other book from Beauregard, and then I want you to destroy it.”
Like a priest making his prayers, repeating the words, Hood had repeated for years, I was right. It was a shock to realize he didn’t believe it.
“Are you sure, Hood?”
He had closed his eyes and I could see the crust in his eyelashes, which now opened slowly.
“I was an arrogant man, Eli. I did send men off to die without good reason. I was a murderer. Don’t you think I understand why you tried to kill me? I always understood. If not for me, you’d be a young farmer up in Middle Tennessee raising corn and beef cattle, and you’d have a beautiful country wife and some country children. Instead you’re a gambling and fornicating ice maker in the Devil’s city.”
I began to protest his description of me, but he was right enough and so I stayed quiet. I looked down and saw the edge of his bed-sheet twisted up in my fist. My family had disappeared like water into the soil, but I had no earthly idea what would have become of me otherwise. It weren’t worth thinking about.
He went silent for a few minutes. His whole body seized up. I thought his eyes would pop. A small trickle of blood ran from his nose before his body relaxed. He was as exhausted a creature as I’d ever seen, as if he’d been awake since they crucified Christ. He had only a few more minutes of words in him. He knew it too.
“I have tried to make amends, anyway. I believe I have acquired some wisdom, I think I understand now. That’s the story in the other book. I believe I’ve done my penance, and I want the children to know this. I want my countrymen to know it. This is an important task. My associate said you would treat it that way.”
The eyes rolled. He wrenched them back again.
“Get the book from Beauregard. Destroy it.”
I nodded.
He coughed. “I cannot be the judge of whether I have fought my sin successfully and done my penance. Neither can you, you are too young. If I have succeeded or failed, the evidence is in the other book, the true book.”
The light was going out in him. The blood drained out of his face.
“You want it published,” I said. “That can be done.”
He reached a hot, dry hand for my own. He held it and tried to squeeze it like he might have when he was powerful and wanted strict attention. Now, I could barely feel the hand move against mine.
“No. Or perhaps later. If you think it’s good. But first, you will take it to a man who can judge my humility, whether I have made amends. You will ask him to read it. He will refuse you, but you must insist. Then you ask him a question.”
I waited while he coughed, and then I wiped his mouth with my handkerchief. He nodded in thanks.
“You are to ask him if the mark of the Devil has been removed from me. If he says yes, publish it as you see fit.”
“This ain’t right. No sir.”
“And if he says no, you are to destroy that book also.”
I dropped his hand. He closed his eyes. Yes, I would do what he told me to do. I would make him this gift, though it was craziness.
“What is his name, Hood?”
“His name is Sebastien Lemerle. You will read about him in the book. It’s all in the book.”
“Where does he live? How do I find him?” I had a hundred questions, but he’d begun to babble. He managed to say only one more thing that made any sense.
“Take care with him, he’s a killer.”
I grabbed his hand, hoping to yank him back to my world for one last moment. “If I burn everything, what will I tell your children? What am I supposed to tell them? What do you want them to know?”
But he was out of his mind and tore at the bedclothes I tried to draw over him. He grabbed me by the back of the neck and pulled my face down to his so that those hard, blue, stone eyes were all I could see. They looked into me as if I’d stolen something and hidden it in my skull.
I knew not to deny a man at his death. I would have done his bidding merely because he asked. I wish he’d known that. I was a better man than he knew. He fell asleep, and I’d never see him awake again. I began the job he’d set me to. Get it over with quick, that was my thought. I went down the hallway again.
I knew that in his library I’d find piles of paper, hundreds of piles on chairs, tables, his desk, the windowsill, each of them a different height as if they had grown independently like children of his mind. How was I to know which was the preferred child, the all-important book?
The library had always been an unlikely place for a general. It was pink. Light pink, almost the color of a young conch. There were no shelves and no books. The white curtains twisted and ballooned in the slightest breeze like steam, and through them the yard and the street seemed soft and temporary, always about to fly off or change as the shadows shifted. Hood had worked at a trestle table, surrounded by his piles of paper and a few rag rugs. Light played off the tall walls and the desk. It was a room for sewing, or practicing music, not for generals.
I looked for a new pile of paper in a place of honor, a pile neatly arranged with a cover or a title. I saw nothing like that. His inkwell was uncapped and the ink had dried hard to the bottom. I saw no pens, no sign of any book he might have written. The only things out of place were the papers scattered on the floor around the waste can, some of them crumpled. I stopped to pick them up and throw them away properly.
I picked up the first piece of paper and the large and glistening wood roach that had been hiding underneath ran over my hand and into a dark corner. I suppose it’s possible that but for that critter I would never have found the manuscript. A roach scuttled across my hand, I looked down in surprise, and on the paper in my hand I found these words:
When I met him
, Eli was a silly boy.
I began poking through his trash, looking for more. I have a sinful man’s appetite for the secret thoughts of others, especially when they concern me.
There wasn’t much more about me, but every one of the discarded pages contained something I’d never heard the General say. I found pages on regret, pages on love, pages on sadness, and yes, pages on humor. The war was on those pages, too, but not the war as a general would remember it. A humble man, no general, had written those pages. This was the new manuscript, it couldn’t be anything else. The pages were moments of a man’s life, and so they were rough here, fine cut there, lollygagging, wandering, quick. He was thirsty, like a man cutting corn in August, but not exactly like that. Got no words of my own for it. They were the confessions of John Bell Hood. I could see that.
The book had been scratched out in fading ink, sometimes only a sentence on a page, sometimes crowded so full of letters and words it looked as if the page had cracked into a thousand pieces. He had not numbered any of them. I began to order them while kneeling there by the rubbish can. I found the rest of the manuscript shoved between the bookcase and the wall.
For that pile of paper I traveled the city a dozen times, tracking people down. I went into the wilderness, too, into the swamps. I knew very little about the Hoods until I found those crumpled pages, and after I found them I couldn’t do much else but read them and obey. They worked magic on me, made me dumb for everything but puzzling out those pages and obeying their commands.
An hour passed. The last of the pages were stuck in a strange book by a fellow named William Blake, and I was reading that crazy book when I heard a knock.
“General Hood?” A voice from outside.
I got up and looked out the window sideways. Down toward the front door I saw a little man with no chin and a black, drooping mustache standing at the front door.
“Are you there?” He rapped at the door with his first knuckles, dainty but insistent. I knew him.
“It’s Doctor Ardoin. Is anyone home?”
The little doctor should have stopped in days before. I snatched up the papers and, having no coat or bag, began to stuff them in my pants. The doctor shouldn’t see them. I was just walking down the hall, trying not to jostle them or make much noise, when Dr. Ardoin let himself in.