by Robert Hicks
This is how my city lives, now. In it, your father and I grew lonelier together. Your father had no interest in continuing the war, and so he turned down the men who came to him to take a position on the negroes and on the Republicans. He turned down the men who asked him to lead them in rousting these invaders. After this, they had no use for him. As for me, I had married the crippled and eccentric and traitorous General, and so I could be safely ignored as well.
And so there we were, orbiting each other, muttering curses at our enemies, hardly ever looking up.
A year ago, your father and I went back to the ballroom where we’d met, for a gathering of swells and toffs and Creoles and mistresses, the usual thing.
“We are going because we have not been invited to a party in quite a many months, and here we are with an invitation,” John said. “So, we go.”
“It helps that it is my cousin’s party.”
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
Here, darling, you might think that your father was being purposely dense, but it’s not true: he really had no idea. Society was not one of his interests, and consequently not something he’d even begun to master.
“You yourself have noticed that we rarely are invited to the parties, and yet you haven’t asked yourself why?”
“No. I assumed there were fewer parties.”
“Remember what city you live in, John.”
“Yes, true.”
“I nearly made a career of going to parties when I was young.”
“Yes, I’d heard that.”
“Fiend!” I punched him on his good shoulder and my fist bounced back.
We were sitting in our parlor, which was still stocked with liquor. I poured him a brandy and took a dram myself.
“I am saying, John, that we are not being invited, and this particular invitation comes to us only because my cousin doesn’t dare to snub me.”
John sipped noisily at his brandy, a bad habit.
“We are being snubbed?”
“Yes.”
“Because?”
“Have you been to any White League meetings?”
“No.”
“Have you written to the newspapers denouncing the Federals? The Freedmen’s Bureau?”
“No. But you know that I couldn’t.”
“Have you burned down a negro house? Lynched a half-breed?”
“No.”
“And you’re a former Confederate general?”
“I see.”
He knew all this of course, that he had failed miserably as a former leader of the late Confederacy. He had not met expectations, and when the notables of our humid, cramped little city wanted a Confederate general—or several—to lead their resistance to Federal rule and the rise of the negro, he had not volunteered. They are people with long memories.
John poured the rest of his brandy out the window onto a pink hydrangea. Another bad habit.
“You’re going to kill that plant.”
“Mmmmm.” He was thinking. “Why would your cousin not dare to snub us?”
“Personal reasons. Family history.”
Which meant, in the ancient code of the Creoles, that I knew she had once taken a colored lover, and that now in her first year of marriage it was imperative that no one else find out. I must be kept happy, and she knew it.
But just to make sure she knew it, I invited her lover to the party myself. I thought it a clever idea at the time, though I hadn’t spoken to Paschal in years.
Does it shock you, Lydia, that I can speak of lovers? I had my own, darling. It’s true, I won’t deny it now that I’m gone and I don’t have to see your face. Don’t be shocked. Perhaps you aren’t shocked. Perhaps you’ve had your own lovers and know the sweet promise and tender violence of an affair. What do you love? I ask not for my own benefit, of course, since I am now moldering in my tomb and unable to hear you. Don’t begrudge me my morbid humor. It’s all that keeps me from crying out for you. I couldn’t go on without death’s wit. Death was something that was always present then, it lingered behind all of us like a shadow waiting to subsume the body. So many people died, it’s easier for me to name the ones who lived.
Paschal, as you now know, was once one of my oldest friends. He was also once, and briefly and in the distant past, my nervous little cousin’s lover. His mother was a quadroon, rumor was. He had thin, knobby, twiggy fingers that stretched far across the piano keyboard and ran promiscuously and lightly over the keys. Among other things, he was a piano teacher, and I have no doubt that during her lessons my cousin had wondered very often about such fingers, each one an independent creature ruling over the white and the black with force and delicacy in turn. She found out in time, though she would tell me nothing.
Are you shocked that one of our family could love a negro? I don’t know that there was much love, merely fondness, but I would understand if you were surprised. You shouldn’t be, really. He was an educated man, after a fashion, and if you didn’t know he’d been an orphan raised by nuns, you’d have assumed he was the son of the finest sons, a gentleman. And surely he was brother to white men unknown, cousin to others, their equal in all but blood, but even blood was less of a barrier to friendship than we might imagine now, now that the lines have been so clearly and cruelly drawn. He had been a friend to some of the men who killed him. My darling, he was their friend to the moment he died, I have no doubt. But most damnably, he had been my friend. His name was Paschal.
The city had changed. Just a few years after the war and we had all begun to behave like the américain, greedy and jealous and so awfully righteous. Paschal had once been trusted with the fairest of Creole blossoms, a misplaced trust in the matter of my cousin, I will admit that, but now he was permitted to teach piano only to his own kind. But we were his kind! Coarse, ignorant, money-mad men were newly admitted to our society because they were white and because they owned the city, but the delicate and talented gens de couleur libre who lacked only our purity (or what purity we had been able to secretly distill from the dark waters of our ancestries) were banished like common servants, or worse. They looked like us, and that could not be excused anymore. Kin denied kin. It sickened me, but of course I went along. I liked my pretty things, my pretty life. Acquiescence was the price of eternal membership in a society that would swaddle me and give me warmth for as long as I lived. That was very silly of me. I should have known there was no constancy in the new city, no loyalties that could not be forgotten or traded. You know this now, child. You need only look around you, you need only look at us here in our house, alone with the dusty and tarnished things. Where are those lovely and chivalrous creatures of my childhood now? They are not here in our house, not here where there is no money or prestige. No one comes to teach my children to play music, no one seeks our company, no one helps fill the pantry. I have no doubt that, were he still alive, Paschal would have come to continue your lessons, Lydia. He would have come. What a bitter thing to know.
This was the real truth of that awful, momentous night: my own ignorance cost a man his life. I had thought that the old rules could still apply if I only wished for them, and that a man like our piano teacher could still, if only for a little while, be allowed the gift of a beautiful night. I had invited him, and I had convinced him all would be all right. Your friends will be there, they will remember you, I said. My cousin will be there. For this foolishness my cousin would not forgive me for many years. After all, I think, she still had loved him.
Paschal died that night. I had invited him there, and there he died. He was beaten and dragged off by men who knew him and had always known he was colored, only that night being colored was a death warrant. I watched them do it and I said nothing. It was so very stupid. He danced with a woman, a white woman, and her drunk brother took up her honor, such as it was, and set in motion events that quickly leaped out of his control and into the hands of another, crueler and more blood-drunk man by the name of Sebastien Lemerle. I cross myself when I write hi
s name, may his evil spirit be banished from me. I can’t write anymore, thinking about it has nearly convinced me to tear this entire letter up, since it’s clear it can only become the chronicle of my sin and loathing. Remember this only: Paschal Girard, the beautiful orphan, disappeared from the earth while I watched.
Shame and loathing and guilt. Guilt is not a sufficient word for what I felt, but it will have to do. I had killed a man even if I did not tie the rope. It was because I was stupid and insisted that the world ran according to my rules and my wishes. Who had ever told me otherwise? I could do nothing but flee the scene of my crime, our crime. What pact had that little killer, that Sebastien Lemerle, made with Lucifer? That is not fair to him. What pact had all of us made, and for what purpose? So that we might be preserved in amber, never changing? So that we might twirl eternally in our dancing shoes across an endless floor, past dark faces holding out full trays in bony hands?
I never told John that I knew Paschal. What does that matter? I should have told him that night, that first moment we heard the shouts and saw the young women running. I didn’t tell him, and then I couldn’t tell him for the shame. And why hadn’t I told him, why hadn’t I said, “John, that is my dearest and oldest friend, you must save him!” John would have done it, for that reason. He needed a reason, that was his sin. And what was my reason for silence? I was like every bystander in every mob formed since God created the earth: I didn’t want anything bad to happen, so I convinced myself it wouldn’t. I didn’t think they would take it so far. And if they weren’t going to take it so far, then why, I reasoned, should I risk revealing myself as the woman who had invited Paschal, as his friend? I’d never be invited to a party again. As much as I claimed to not care about our snubbing, it had cut me hard. I wanted to go to their parties, so I let them kill Paschal. That’s what I did.
I left John that night and walked to your grandmother’s house in my bare feet. I left my shoes at the base of a small oak like the one that had hidden me. An offering. Oyster shells in the road cut my soles. I prayed to St. Basil and the Holy Mother, the two who knew the ways out of Hell. I prayed that I might be rescued from my sin, that the pact with evil would be broken, torn up, and burned. I remembered to pray for all of us, too. It was an afterthought. I don’t remember praying for the souls of strangers before that night. I have prayed that way many times since. May God forgive me my youth.
I arrived at their house as the moon fell below the trees. It crossed my mind that I might never return to John, to our house and, forgive me, to you. I thought of you, though, I thought of you so innocent and sweet, probably asleep in your blue gown, your hair tangled around your face, your chest rising and falling silently while the other girls, Anna Bell and Ethel, snored in perfect rhythm. But I was marked, condemned, I was sure of it, and I could not risk seeing you. I was contagion.
The path to the front door was cool underfoot, lined by squared boxwoods and lavender. I could feel each red brick and each line of mortar, canted this way and that, a pattern I’d nearly forgotten since, as a girl, I’d run that path without shoes, ever in flight from pirates, or alligators, or fish oil, or church. I had known those bricks as well as I had known my own freckles. I had once been able to walk the path with closed eyes, knowing with each step where I was, what would come next, and how close I was to the end. That awful night I closed my eyes and walked. I discovered I had not forgotten. At the end, at the foot of the steps and in the gaslight that wavered behind the wings of moths and an ephemera of mayflies, I stopped and opened my eyes. I watched the last few bloody footprints behind me disappear into the brick.
My mother believed I must have taken ill, otherwise why would I cast off my shoes and my husband, and bloody my feet? No fever, she said, but a spell nonetheless. She sent me to bed and washed my feet through the night. She said I looked like a ghost.
I wished John could have known Paschal. Paschal had not been of this world, he’d been something apart, something blessed and innocent, though not so innocent that he didn’t know how to acquit himself with a woman, as my cousin had once reveled in telling me. There are beings not meant to live among the rest of us, I think. They have been lost on the way to Heaven, they live only as an exception, an anomaly. Paschal was born out of sin, and as if to refute that wickedness and the transgression of abandonment, he swallowed beauty whole, infusing himself with it. Art and music, they were all. He played the piano as if the instrument were only incidental, a convenient conduit for thoughts that became music when exposed to air. It would not have surprised me had he made his music from rocks and ash, from the clang of iron on brick.
But this is what a killing does: it proves that safety is a wisp, that evil is strong, and that every moment of comfort and peace and beauty rests on a foundation of wishful thinking and ignorance.
CHAPTER 10
John Bell Hood
I knew Sebastien Lemerle, I had known him many years before, but on that night at the ball, I let Anna Marie think I’d never seen him before. I led Anna Marie to think I was a coward, which was far better than her thinking I was complicit in the scene unfolding before us: in the torture, the perversity, the mercilessness. Better she think me only a coward than a cruel and inhuman coward. Better that she didn’t know that I had been shocked to paralysis the moment I recognized him.
I believed Sebastien Lemerle was an evil blown into our lives from parts unknown, that he was sent by the Devil to murder, terrify, and destroy, and we were not to understand. Only bear it, bear the burden of man’s lot and original sin. But it did not fall to us randomly.
On the train into the city, the old man had warned me that I would be remembered. I thought he meant recognized, singled out, noticed as I limped and clunked down the street. To be remembered, though, that implied a kind of familiarity I was sure I wouldn’t find in New Orleans. This was why I had chosen the city, to escape. These were not my people, these were not my trees and birds and fish, these were not my streets, these were not my churches. I would disappear in New Orleans, lost to memory. I dreamt sometimes, when it was particularly heavy and wet in my quarters, when dreams came as in a fever, that my leg would grow back. Everything else grew in the damned place. The air lay upon me like soil and I felt new.
But I knew Sebastien Lemerle, and surely I was remembered by him. He would not have been able to forget, and had I cared to think about it, I might have guessed he’d be in the city. I did not care for Sebastien, though, as I cared very little for the men I ruined.
It was a hundred years ago. A thousand, maybe.
I remember him clearly. He rode with me in Texas before the war. He polished and sharpened his knives when he wasn’t eating or sleeping or fighting. He let his black hair grow down in front of his eyes and he never said much to the rest of us, and then it was often in French. He was a corporal, in charge of men. He never raised his voice and still his squad never questioned him and always followed. I wondered what hold he might have over them, but only briefly. I assumed he was a private disciplinarian, meting out beatings and threats when no one was looking. It had been my experience, to that point, that men could be led by fear. I learned later, in the war, that love would bind men, thousands of men, to some generals, but by then it was too late for me. I was the Gallant Hood, riding into danger, damned be the weak and nearly everyone else.
In Texas I was young. I wanted to fight. I wanted to fight Comanche. Sebastien Lemerle and his squad came with me.
We drove for many days over dry country. The horses had little to drink and less to eat as there was very little rain to green the sand and dirt. The earth there was broken into slabs thrust up in every direction and concealing the dark and narrow avenues of ambuscade. In the daylight we avoided those hiding places, and in the night we sought them out. One morning we awoke to a brief rain, and we all gathered about one man who was holding out an old oilcloth in his wide arms, catching the water in its trough. We drank like dogs.
We were out for weeks longer than I
reported. The Comanche were always ahead of us, leaving their curious, light-footed tracks. At least once every couple of days we’d see one watching us. We were always just a half day’s ride away, always so close. I wanted them. I didn’t realize then, in my cursed and doomed youth, that one killing led to another, geometrically, until the only way possible to escape the massacre was to lead a whole army into the maw and hope for an ending.
The first man to go down was one of our sharpshooters, a Kentucky man like me, but small, blond, and bone hard. He spoke in tongues and thrashed while the other men tried to hold him down. He needed water and there was no one with enough to spare. To share it would mean a sooner death for us. He asked us to give him his birthday cake, he asked us who we were, he asked what day is the fair gone start? I took Sebastien aside.
“We’ll have to leave him.”
“We can send him back, sir. One man could take him back.”
“I can spare one man, but not two.”
I looked at Sebastien closer then. He had fine bones, and a large and round head, but his face was pocked. He wore his hair long to cover it, I realized. He never looked at me directly, always at my shoulder or my feet or at some imaginary figure off in the short distance. He chewed his words and let them go with a struggle, as if he were afraid of what would happen if he looked me in the eye. Not to him, but to me. The idea amused me, but I didn’t know him so well then.
“Yes sir. But we can leave him a horse and what food and water we can give up. He can have mine.”
The more he talked, the more righteous I became.
“We leave no food or water behind. We can’t spare it, Corporal, and you know it quite well. He can have the horse, she’s in worse shape.”
“We have to spare it. The food. The water. He’ll die.” He pushed the hair out of his eyes.