A Separate Country

by Robert Hicks

  I said I would join him and began to stand, but he whispered that I ought to sit with Mother and Father awhile, as this was the last night of the summer with their daughter. So I sat and watched him hitch and limp out the same door Gustave had slammed open.

  Mother began to cry and Father handed her his handkerchief, which he removed and held out to her without barely seeming to move. She nodded. “They are both so wrong, and that is all that I know,” she said. “I don’t know what to believe.”

  I said nothing and neither did Father. Mother looked from one to the other of us, waiting for Lord knows what, and finally she excused herself also. We all stood. Mother went through the door to the upstairs bedrooms, and I waved to Father before walking out onto the veranda on my way to our little cabin where the children, if God was in His heaven, would be sleeping and I could lie awake all night in peace.

  Outside the candlelight the stars crowded and receded and flashed, and the more I stared the more the dark seemed to lighten and disappear. On the lake, chopped by a light night breeze, the starlight broke and multiplied. The peaty rot of cypress water drifted in the air, also the sweet rusty scent of grass that’s been out in the sun all day. The rocks that formed the veranda’s short wall where I sat had been warmed by the same sun.

  “Anna Marie?”

  Father’s voice from the doorway, tentative. Letting his eyes adjust to the dark, I suppose.

  “Right here, Father.”

  “Ah. Yes.”

  He walked over and stood next to where I sat until I patted the rock next to mine. He thanked me, though it was his wall. He had built it when I was still a baby.

  Quiet. Father could appreciate quiet, as well as the undeserved spectacle of the heavens. John was the same way. Silence was no sin among us. But, finally, Father came out to say what he had to say.

  “The General is an unusual man, Anna Marie.”

  “Yes, he is, but I always knew it. So did you, I think.”

  More quiet. Father toed the cracks in the stone below his feet.

  “I did know it. But I’m not sure I quite understood until tonight what that meant. I thought he was just an eccentric, because a man is never quite like the rest of us when he comes back from war. Never. But it’s not just that.”

  I wondered if he’d been sent out by Mother.

  “So what have you learned tonight about my unusual husband, Father? I don’t intend to change him, and I know I couldn’t anyway.”

  “Oh, Anna Marie, I hope he doesn’t change. I will pray for the world to change around him.”

  “That’s a strange idea, and I’m not sure what it means, either.”

  “I mean that a man who is willing to face criticism, ridicule, failure, because he prefers to believe that men are good, such a man is closer to God than the rest of us. He is unusual, he is good. But. But, but, but.” He took my hand and pulled gently so that I would face him. “He is naïve and you are not, at least not about life in this city. He has seen more of the worst of man than you and I will ever see if we are lucky. He was a brutal commander, Anna Marie, I know you don’t like to hear this, but it’s true. He had no patience for weakness and he was arrogant. He cost many men their lives without good reason. He knows it, I heard it tonight. And I heard a man praying for absolution, willing to suffer for it.”

  “I heard a man dressing down a loudmouthed twit, that’s what I heard.”

  “Possibly. Yes, that’s true. He was good at it, wasn’t he?” I looked at Father, who was chuckling. “I would have liked to have seen Gustave challenge John. No, I would not have liked to see that, that’s a terrible thought. But I will always have the dream.”

  My father had always loved me best. It’s not nice to say, but it’s true. And I believed, when I thought about it, that I loved him more than Mother or anyone in the world until I married John. I wondered if Father had ever been jealous.

  “If you love him, little Anna Marie, you will make sure that Gustave, and all the rest, are proven wrong. And if you can’t keep him from himself and disaster, you must know that it was the price of loving a man like that. You may suffer, but you must not quit him because he is unsuited for this world. You knew that at the beginning and you loved him anyway. God is love, you know.”

  I could only nod, for fear that I would betray what I truly thought and ruin those words that still hung between us, ruin his remaining faith in my own innocence.

  “I like him, Anna Marie.”

  “I do as well.”

  “You would, of course.” He stood up to leave. “You were an obstinate, delightful child.”

  In the cabin the children were asleep and John sat bent over his suit by the moonlight at the window, maniacally brushing it. I was afraid he might rip it and I took it from him and hung it from the wardrobe door. He sighed and relaxed his shoulders. There were fingernail marks on his forehead, bloodless quarter moons, which he got sometimes when he held his face in his hands. I think it kept him from yelling. In all the years I’ve known your father, Lydia, I’ve never heard him yell except at horses and dogs, and then very politely.

  I sat in the chair opposite his and took his hands.

  “You don’t believe a word of what you said at the table tonight, do you?”

  “I want to believe it. I want to live like that. I want to trust.”

  “Why, for heaven’s sake?”

  He looked down at his hands in mine, cracked and red.

  “Because I’ll lose you if I don’t.”

  “I don’t need you to have the blind faith of a saint.”

  “I know. Still.”

  “What?”

  “I must learn to trust men, to believe in men, or I will never learn to trust you.”

  “Me? My God, John, what have I done that would make you mistrust me, of all people?”

  “You married me. Of all people.”

  I loosened the bindings on my dress and let it slip down. I stood up and it slid to the floor. John tried to pick it up but I fended him off with my foot. Soon I was naked, and I didn’t much think about the children in the other room.

  “Let’s go fishing.”

  John smiled, and it was good. I suspected he would lose our money, that Gustave would have the last word, and it didn’t much matter to me at that moment. And even at the very worst, when I thought John had lost his mind and our money, I never forgot that he had sacrificed some part of himself, the vicious and paranoid and brutal part—the part that had always kept him safe—for me.

  Back in the city he still barked his confidence, intimidating to his colleagues and the men of his club, but he always suspected he had erred somehow, somewhere, whether at the office or at home, and that he had missed this error, and that consequently people laughed at him when he wasn’t looking.

  He couldn’t help that, it was part of him. He resisted it, he ignored it. Soon, though the world hadn’t changed and it was just as petty and deceptive as ever, he himself began to change. Slowly, slowly.

  CHAPTER 8

  John Bell Hood

  In our tenth year together there was a party, a ball, thrown by Anna’s cousin Henriette. We didn’t go to parties much, and that suited me just fine most of the time. But on this night, a year or so ago, I had decided that we should attend. I don’t know why, except that perhaps I wanted to show off my new leg, which allowed me to walk with nearly no limp. I had been practicing.

  “They will not recognize you without the hobble, John,” Anna Marie had called out from her dressing room. “You have lost part of your character.”

  “Does a limp form character? I think it is more of an amusement, and I am glad not to be amusing your friends anymore.”

  “They are not amused by your wounds, John. They are sympathetic and solicitous, I thought. They take pity. You are the warrior in their midst.” She laughed.

  “I call that being an amusement.”

  “I call you pitiful, but I’m still fond of you.”

  We were going to th
e very same ballroom where we had met, where Anna Marie had so rudely and insistently ingratiated herself to me. God bless that ballroom. Perhaps that was why I wanted to go to the party this time: to revisit the beginning, to remember what had happened that night.

  I walked down the stairs to the library. The dust raised little motes out of the deep pile of the Venetian runner that had been in the house since the beginning. We had let our staff go, and the dust didn’t bother me. The dust was natural, normal, it made the place seem substantial to me. It annoyed Anna Marie, though, and I knew she’d take a broom to it soon.

  I stepped into the courtyard outside the library and had a smoke. There is a kind of Louisiana sky that is so deep and blue and bottomless and bright that the occasional cloud that slips off the Gulf can cast a shadow with the power to shock and startle, before quickly moving off, leaping over walls and roofs and into the next courtyard. I blew smoke and watched a cloud glide over, and quickly the courtyard went black before reappearing again in blinding color. Mockingbirds and sparrows flitted away from the darkness, calling to each other in search of the light. If I had been aboard that cloud, I thought, I could have looked down on one hundred square blocks of the city, each carved into a delicate labyrinth of courtyards and hidden gardens. My wife had mastered these labyrinths, grown up in them. They would always be a mystery to me.

  The children had been carted over to their grandmother’s apartment for the evening, and so the only sound I heard when I came back inside was the whisper and slip of Anna Marie descending the stairs in her gown. I could see her frowning at the dust, until she realized I was watching her, and then she smiled sweetly and let me take her hand.

  “Are we walking?” she asked.

  “I haven’t sold the trap yet. We’ll ride.”

  “Shall I drive? Or do you promise not to run into any old men on the way?”

  “I will try.”

  Anna Marie was very excited, she bounced in her seat, and I realized how long it had been since we had stepped out. At the ball we danced and we acted as chaperones because we were, now, two of the old people. I rested on the same settee where Anna Marie had perched the first time I saw her. This time, I watched her cut through the guests and greet her cousin, who had been talking to a tall, lanky man with the playful dark eyes of a sprite. He favored his right leg without noticing it, the sign of an old wound. Ha! Someone else for amusement! Anna Marie’s cousin looked nervous, but I hardly noticed it because Anna Marie looked so happy. I could hear her laugh across the ballroom, her head back and her hair cascading down her back.

  Later we went outside to the garden in our role as monitors of the chaste. There was St. Joseph again, he seemed an old friend. We held hands and whispered jokes to each other and looked stern. The moon had come up quartered but bright, and when I looked closer I could see that someone had given St. Joseph a garland of gardenias. Good for you, Joe, I thought. I was happy just then.

  After a few minutes, I noticed the several young ladies who had also been haunting the garden. They hurried toward the foyer door, frightened of something, and at first I thought they were merely concerned that their dalliances would be found out. Then I heard angry shouts and laughter from around the corner of the building. I heard the sound of a sword slipping from its scabbard. It was a sound I could never mistake, a hypnotic sound. I lost myself for a moment, and with a nod to Anna Marie, I made for the sound.

  I can only explain this behavior of mine as instinctual, bred in and cultivated until I could no longer turn away from the fight, until I was only a dog in the pack for whom survival meant culling the weak. How easily I forgot Anna Marie in that moment. I hurried down the river-stone path and around the corner into a small clearing that opened up out of the live oaks and magnolias, a small green lawn lit by yellow light through the windows of the service kitchen. Five young Creole men—I knew them by their fine features and prissy coats—had surrounded a sixth of their number. The negro servants watched nervously from the back steps outside the kitchen. An old black man removed his neck rag and twisted it in apprehension.

  The sixth Creole stood a head taller than the rest, though this did him no good every time he fell to the ground drunk. I drew closer, staying among the trees, taking cover in the dark, preserving my options. I had no weapon. They were all drunk, and one of the antagonists had drawn a curious weapon, thinner than a rapier but equally sharp at its end. It looked like a very large sewing needle, and it appeared to have been removed not from a scabbard but from a false cane. Such odd people.

  The tall man in the middle smiled and laughed as the others shouted at him. He was drunk enough to think everything a joke. I moved closer. I was a scout again. My leg was flesh once more, and I saw nothing but battle.

  “Nigger!”

  “Traitor!”

  “Filthy bastard.”

  The tall man held up his hands and smiled.

  “Now, now,” he said. “Who is this nigger we speak of, this black heart?”

  “You sneak in and dance with my sister?”

  “I have known your sister as long as you have, Edgar! I danced with her when you still shat your pants. I taught her the piano, for heaven’s sake.”

  The tall man looked around for laughing faces and found none.

  “I will kill you! I will tear your tongue out and serve it to the woolly heads you call kin!”

  This must have been the brother, who looked every bit as negro as the tall man, which is to say not at all.

  I almost turned back then. A drunken fight, with curses. They likely would not even lay hands on each other except to hug and sob and hoist another bottle together. Such a commonplace. I thought to go find Anna Marie, but before I could turn she tapped me on the shoulder. In the moonlight that snuck down through the leaves, I could see her face creased by worry.

  “What are you doing?” I whispered.

  “I am as curious as anyone.” She looked out at the mob. “Oh blessed Mary!”

  “We should leave.”

  A little man had pulled the brother, Edgar, aside and was whispering in his ear. He pulled the young man’s head down to his mouth and wrapped his meaty right hand around his face, curiously intimate and violent at once. The tall man entertained himself by making faces at the other men and dancing gimp-kneed with his hands in front of him and his legs cocked out like those of a mantis. He carried a cane carved red and black like a snake, but it didn’t look like it would be much help in a fight.

  “See, I’m dancing, I’m dancing! Just like a nigger. Who’s going to stop me?”

  The little man looked up, unblinking, at the dancing man. He nodded and pushed the outraged brother away.

  “Just like a nigger,” he said, offering the dancing man a bottle. “It’s a remarkable likeness. Bravo!”

  “Thank you, Sebastien.”

  “I wonder if you aren’t holding back, though.”

  The dancing man wiped his mouth and offered the bottle around, but found no takers.

  “What you mean?”

  “Take off your shoes.”

  “These are fine, fine shoes. I’m not giving them to you.”

  “Nigger, do what you’re told,” Edgar shouted. The little fellow, Sebastien, turned toward him.

  “Shut up your mouth right now.”

  Edgar backed up behind the others, nodding his head, like a cur just whipped.

  Anna Marie was still standing behind me, pressed against my back. There was no sweet familiarity in her now, only fear.

  I sized up the man who had taken charge of the little farce unfolding in front of me. I would never have given him a second thought except for the way his face never broke, never betrayed emotion even when he blissed out Edgar. A face carved of hard wood, and yet practically placid. I knew a face like that, once. The others maintained space around him, wherever he stood, as if they would turn to stone by touching him. This was the sort of man I once had sought out for my lieutenants, when I had needed men others feared di
sappointing, men who could lead other men into bloody chaos across burning bulwarks without leaving a single straggler behind. Such men were not often imposing to look at, they didn’t look fearsome. Men feared them not because of what they could do, but what they had done and, most importantly, what they would do. I knew a man like that once. Other men shrank from him while gazing on in fascination.

  Sebastien took the tall man’s shoes and placed them neatly on the steps behind him, scattering two negro servants back into the house. I could see that he’d drawn a substantial but tentative crowd. Men peered around the corners of the building and from the trees. Women gathered in little knots, whispering. With every minute it became darker as the stars rolled out of the sky. The dancing man, now without shoes or stockings, moved in and out of the growing darkness.

  “I will take good care of your shoes, friend,” the blackbird said. He smiled and his teeth seemed to glow.

  “They say he took those teeth from a lame Guinea he found begging on one of his boats,” Anna whispered. That was ridiculous, of course, but such legends arise from fear.

  “Roll your pants up.” The tall man, still enjoying himself in his stupor, seemed to think it a game. He rolled his pants up underneath his knees. Two perfect legs, I thought.

  “Now your jacket. Take it off.”

  The tall man hesitated, and for the first time he tried to focus his wayward eyes on the man in front of him, to try to get some sense of what was happening, I suppose. It’s too late for that, son, I thought.

  “Why are they doing this to him?”

  Anna Marie looked at me angrily, desperately, as if my ignorance was unbearable. At once she was ready to cry and ready to fight. I knew a man who had inspired that emotion in women. Before he killed them.

  “He is an octoroon, I believe, and he should not have been here.”

  She was crying and clawing at her hands. I stopped her.

  “He is a negro?”

  “Such a blunt, unsubtle word.”

  “He is as white as they are. White like me.”