A Separate Country

by Robert Hicks

  Like Gertrude, I am also sick, though I fear I am much worse. This is the last reason for writing to you. I might not live to tell you these things in their own good time. I was old to be having any more children. I was old the last time, with Oswald, who was born precisely nine months ago when the city itself was sick. Thousands dying around him of all manner of contagion, and yet Oswald remained considerate. He waited until we were safely removed from the city and out of the reach of the miasma bearing yellow fever and cholera and scarlet fever and measles, until we were safely settled on the other side of the lake, until it had become clear that we would never return to a city exactly as it was, until it was clear that we, the Hoods, had been changed, and only then did Oswald choose to come into the world. Such an awful time, and yet such a perfect birth. I was forty years old, I had no business having a baby. Even so, I was walking around the little fish camp the next day and, a week later, I admitted the General back into my bed.

  Now, when we are poor but happy, after the best year of my life, I give birth to a little girl who takes most of me with her. I will not be coy about the blood. It ran from me as if I were a fount, a headwater. Everything was red and hot and humid in that room. It smelled like metal, I could taste it in the air. If not for the negress sent by my old friend Rintrah, I would have died I’m sure. But she made poultices and mumbled words in a broken tongue I could not understand, I suppose it was Houdou language though it might have been Latin. Or both. When the bleeding stopped they burned the sheets in the back courtyard. I remember hearing myself beg them not to burn so many sheets, that we had none to spare. I sounded tired, I think.

  It’s been three weeks and I am still very cold. I am shivering, though it is April and the sweet olives are sending off their scent, which drifts in on the river breeze. I have a fever, the negress says, but I will not die from it. How does she know? She stands at the foot of my bed, freckles dashed across her cheeks and hair up in a green tignon, eyes constantly blinking and round like a doll’s. She rocks from side to side, saying her blasphemous Mass, and I am comforted. She says I will not die yet. Good. But I will take no chances.

  There are things I must explain to you. You should know how we have become who we are. You should be proud to be a Hood, to be one of these Hoods. There wasn’t always a good reason to be proud, but now there is. You will understand. Let me begin.

  I remember taking the coupé out and over to Esplanade, through the faubourgs and between the saplings, the day before you were born, Lydia. It was John’s idea. His first child, and I suppose all he could remember were the cows of his Kentucky boyhood, and so he went out to exercise his woman and encourage you along. Perhaps he thought I would drop you in a nice, soft pile of hay miraculously deposited on the wayside? I asked him this, and he blushed. (Have you seen him blush? He can, you know.) I laughed and he laughed and it was grand. Scandalous. The delicate and properly appointed Creole ladies gawked at me, bouncing along swollen and sweating. John smiled as if he’d won a great prize. The ladies yapped like terriers and shied away from us in a spray of skirts, as if they could catch whatever had so obviously addled our brains. I was a Creole gone mad. I was a white Creole, a new distinction that hadn’t been nearly so important before the war. A white Creole expecting her child would lie on lounges in dark corners berating the service, the consommé, the pharmacist, and her husband. Birth, that consuming pain measured in brief moments of sweetness, was an evil visited upon the white Creole lady. Such ladies did not ride about, and certainly not alone with their husbands. The colored Creole women either didn’t complain, or we just never heard about it. Our city, Lydia, is full of silliness.

  John was scared. Hard to tell behind the tattered curtain of beard, but it was true. Of death? It is strange that while a life gathers we think of death, but it was inescapable. I’m sure it crossed his mind. I thought of it very little.

  I believe he thought that you and any other child would appear into the world broken, ashamed of him, and implacable. That you would bear his mark and never forgive him for it. The truth of John Bell Hood, and what made it possible to love him, was that he cared what you thought of him. You, little you, Lydia. He would fight others over what they thought of him, but he did not love them. And Lord, do not think he spoke of love! To name it would turn it against him, or cause it to fall apart. Better not to say is the twin of Better not to know.

  A man pulled his carriage out of a porte cochere just as John gave the horses their head, urging them on so that I would laugh at the way his whiskers blew over his shoulder. The horses stumbled in the dirt and nipped each other. I fell forward against the console before John could yank me back.

  The man in the carriage looked at us, stared briefly at me, and told John he was a drooling fool with no business on his street. En français, of course.

  “What did he say, Anna?”

  “He apologized.”

  “Did not sound like an apology.”

  The other man stepped down, erect, gray, girded in black like a smokestack. Unblemished. I am sorry to write that word, but it is what I remember. It is what I always thought when I saw John next to another man. John stepped down from our coupé. Heavily. He leaned toward his left leg, away from the wooden one, and in that position his left arm, half useless, hung down, straight and unmoving. While John composed himself, he could sometimes look as if he might fall apart, especially when he was angry and his face glowed red as if from the effort to hold his pieces together. But he moved very quickly. The tall man stepped back and soiled his heel in a puddle.

  “Did you wish to speak to me, sir?” John’s blue eyes disappeared into a squint.

  “No, no. Non.”

  “I believe you do.”

  “It is over. Please go back to your wife.”

  “I do not take…”

  John was near to telling the old man that he would not be ordered, that he would give orders and that the man had angered him and would not be allowed to retreat unscathed. Then, at that very moment, the creases in his face sloughed off and he stood placid and silent before the Creole. I watched. I knew what he was thinking, what he was willing himself to think: Perhaps he is right. Return to Anna Marie. I foreswear the fight. I refuse. It was a litany, words he forced upon himself as others might force the Bona Mors upon themselves at their own deathbeds.

  Something in him had died, and something better had grown in its place, right there where John now stood. He bowed his head and limped back to the coupé without speaking. He looked at me. I saw blue, pure blue. He sat up on the driver’s box and quietly waved the old Creole on. The other, puzzled, took the reins and drove off. John put his good hand lightly on my leg and in a whisper asked if I had been hurt. I said no. We drove off slowly, this time quietly admiring the sweet, drifting scent of orange trees in bloom.

  That was the General, not as I’d met him, but as he came to be. He could do nothing but fight. It was his character. But he had learned to find different sorts of fights. He fought for love, for instance. Believe me when I say he didn’t understand the first thing about love when we met. But with love, the struggle replenishes, the combatant rarely fails to rise. You were born the next day, our first child.

  I hope that you never leave this city. I hope you will love it as I have, imperfectly, inconstantly, but passionately. I am captured by this town of my ancestors, by the heat and milky bright light, by the smell of sweet olives. There has been little for me but this city. I wonder if I could breathe the air outside New Orleans, whether I would drown. Has any person ever been so perfectly formed by such a small place? It can’t be left behind: the streets I walked on, the doors I entered, the steeples I navigated by, the bright and ringing crystal I raised to my lips, the river, the carriages, the gliding crowds of nuns. I could see myself laid out in every direction, street for blood and building for bone. I am glad of this place only because I could not survive anywhere else.

  I remember days in my peignoir, reclining below the window, the
breeze lying on me and gliding over me, the men on the banquette stealing glances and hurrying off, eyes cast down. This was New Orleans, too, the city I had made. A funny city arrayed between the flesh and the cross. Paris had been that way, though older and weighed down by centuries. Its flesh sagged, its crosses gathered dust, but my home was young and avid for both cross and flesh. None of those men passing by my window and stealing glimpses of the girl draped in lace would have guessed I had a volume of Livy open in my lap, and a slender copy of Songs of Innocence and of Experience under my pillow. I was a young woman and all around me things ripened when I passed, or they were made new again.

  This was the woman who married your father, who met him at another senseless ball, another night of light across dark gardens, sweet dough frying, the hollow thump of my shoes on thick carpet, violins glistening on the shoulders of black-suited young men. The geometry of the parquet stretched out in every direction, uninterrupted by the twirl and slide of bodies orbiting each other like planets, their gravities stronger every minute. The servants laughed and made jokes at the top of the stairs, performing their own dance and coming together by their own physical laws. They spoke French.

  No, this is not precisely the woman who met your father. I must try again. Why do I write this? It is this pen. It is smooth and black, edged in gold with a gold nib. It fits my hand perfectly, as if it isn’t there. I’ve never noticed it before, but how many inanities have I forced through it onto paper? Thousands. Letters and notes crossing the city year after year. Have I written anything to remember me by? This pen questions me. Will I write something of use? It is a beautiful pen.

  You could not understand the girl who met the General without meeting the girl who flung her clothes off for the thrill of being watched, who remained chaste even so, and who slippered about the streets like a Helen without a war and no idea how to start one. Silly girl, I still love her. But do not let me catch you posing nude for old men, Lydia. I have friends at a convent that would take you, chère.

  I was a young woman but still a child, stepping along the banquettes with my dress caught up in my hand to avoid the mud and the sharp corners of the boxes piled everywhere. Young and beautiful. What has happened to that skin, that shiny hair? Who was that girl? I hardly recognize her now. She was buoyed by desire, it carried her down toward the opera house: her desire and the desire of the men who lingered in the dissipating fog of her lavender scent. I remember that she wanted to be touched, and yet on every block down Royal and over toward the Opera she was not even brushed in passing. Crowds parted, children ceased their jump roping, delivery boys gave wide. I was the blushing, buxom figurehead of a cutter parting the sea of mortals. I trembled. So much power.

  This is what I remember. The truth is lost, and unimportant anyway. This is what I remember: I was walking to meet a man who had promised that no one would ever know my name, that he would be discreet. I looked classical and Greek, he said, and I felt it. I had power bestowed on me in curves and color and angles. I had little idea of what to do with it, what I was expected to do with it, what others did with it. The only idea I had, a dream really, was of soft, dark tapestries encircling me and a man, some man powerful and deep-eyed. We fell and fell without end in sweet air. I knew nothing of such things, of course, and so I found myself skipping along the banquette to a rendezvous with a failed painter. Posing for him seemed obvious.

  The little man was pocked and the corners of his mouth were wet. He wore black, his legs were bowed and thin. Bent and charred twigs. I lay on his chaise while he fiddled with the stove, cursing it until it warmed. He made tea. I heard the cups nervously twittering on their plates when he came back into the room. I took pleasure in saying I was not thirsty. I was cruel. I had draped my clothes over his washbasin, as there were no chairs. The yellow satin drape fit me perfectly, and I arranged it as I’d seen in sculpture. Modestly at first. He stood behind his easel and unknotted his cravat. There were no other paintings in his room, a third-floor garret around the corner from the Opera with a view of the muddy river. I smelled fish and burning sugar, wonderful scents to me now. He scratched at the canvas with a brush he held like a pen. He asked me to pull the drape down and I pulled it down to my waist. I gathered my hair behind my head and leaned on one hand. The other traced my hip. He came over to adjust the drape, and when I felt his hand sliding across me, I bit him. He yelled and I screamed theatrically. He begged me to silence. I put on my clothes while he stood in the corner, staring. There was no paint on the canvas. He asked me to have mercy on a forgotten man.

  I am not cruel, but I was very cruel that day. How could I know what I possessed without seeing it reflected in someone else’s face, in the way they walked toward me, in the way they cowered? I was rapt during my walk home. It had been a joy, a secret had been revealed. I was mindless of anything but the fast-expanding boundary of my world, so much so that I neglected the mud and the nails in the boxes piled along my way. When I arrived home, disheveled and dirty, trailing threads of my dress like a ruined train, my mother thought I’d been attacked. I fell, I told her, and giggled.

  Silly little girl. Had I been an ape with a bosom the old man might have still invited me up to his studio. The intoxicated mind sees what it desires everywhere. And how long did I think I could play the coquette? Not forever. I write this now while listening to one of my ten, soon to be eleven, children pulling another’s hair. Perhaps that child is you, Lydia.

  My city: Fat men in vests trading cotton and rice straight from the quay. The horses in their stalls at the fairgrounds. Smoke on the streetcar, watermelon cast into the water of the St. John by playful boatmen. Drunk men, men with monkeys, men without shoes, men without sense, men in tall hats and thick beards. Mandolins on the galleries. Beautiful boys, deformed boys, strong boys. Christ in every possible pose and dress, in every church, on every street, above every rambling of headstones. Corpus. Iesus nazarenus rex iudaeorum. King of the Creoles. King of the Spanish. King of the Irish, the Germans, the English, the américain. King of the Negroes. Christ everywhere. Christ above me, Christ below me, Christ at my right hand, Christ at my left hand. The Creoles had their cathedral, and then the Irish. Even the Germans built their own big church down by the tracks near the wharf. We prayed. Flowers sprouted in walls, through walls, around walls. All things grew. We picked sprigs of jasmine and set them behind our ears. We gaped at the dirty girls with bright white teeth hawking Creole tomatoes down along the market. In the faubourgs, we knew a place where the old quadroon slept beneath her awning and served good coffee and cold milk. Palms rattled and scraped, dry and green, in the air above her. We craved her chicken, baked in rosemary and served with cress.

  I smoked cigars and rode horses. I rode them fast so that the gaudy new houses lately raised by Americans in our neighborhood—Creoles called it the country—would streak together until they were indistinguishable and mere sloppings of color. Mud in my hair and on my nose, hooves clattering over canal bridges. Riding away from town, the wilderness stretched to my right. There were trails, and at night, campfires ringed by men in foreign clothes cackling nonsense. Italians and Germans. Sometimes there were families of negroes, but they had no campfires and tried to hide from me. They were like Indians. I smiled at them. I was not the law, I thought.

  I now know that I was naïve, and that the law always follows certain of us whatever our intentions. It was good that I was also a private girl and hated telling anyone anything about my adventures. The negresses often had children at their breast and others sitting by or climbing the old knotty cypresses. During the day they were alone. I brought them what I could sneak out of the house, usually bonbons. Sometimes it was pralines made by the colored women down at the market. They were little things, luxuries, ridiculous things of no value in the deep woods of their exile.

  Do not think too much of your mother, do not think she was a particularly charitable or kind girl. Those people in the woods were my playthings, my amusements. My father n
ever caught me carrying off supplies into the woods, though I’m sure he suspected.

  This was the way we maintained civility amid cruelty: we’d rather not know, and we wished there was nothing to know in the first place.

  I cast myself out from my family, although they never ceased their efforts to bring me back. I roamed, I ate ices straight from the Italians making them on the street, I studied dirt. I loved my family, but I would not be their possession. I hope they understand that now.

  I fell in with other outcasts and they became my family. Michel Martin, who you know as Father Mike, Rintrah King the clown, and the lovely fine-fingered and light-footed boy who had named himself Paschal Girard because no one had bothered to gift him a name. He was a boy of other worlds, a hunter of fairies and fleeting beauty.

  The most important thing that ever happened to me, the thing that changed my life and eventually your father’s, long before we were married, happened the night the four of us—Michel, Rintrah, Paschal, and I—first came together as mere children. Nothing about my life was the same afterward. I sometimes wish it had never happened, but now I cannot imagine who I would have become without them.

  * * *

  I went to the backswamp as I’ve told you I liked to do. I was older then, older than you, old enough to have become a woman and still young enough to trust in the protection of my horse and in my mastery of the close dark of the backwoods paths I knew by heart.