A Separate Country

by Robert Hicks

  “Where is my leg?”

  “Ah, yeah, don’t know about that.”

  “Liar.”

  “That’s no way to talk to the man who’s been tending you through your illness.”

  “What illness?”

  “Some would say that the Devil had taken you, and although that is a favorite explanation among my colleagues, I don’t generally subscribe to it unless I see horns and fire and that sort of thing. I think you’re just mad, crazy like a damned mumblestumbler.”

  “Give me my leg back.”

  He tugged at his beard and split it into two spikes. Who looked the Devil now?

  “I’m not lying when I say I don’t know where Rintrah put it. Can’t say it wasn’t smart of him. But don’t worry about that now. Hop on over there and kill the runt. Drag yourself if you have to.”

  He was scheming me, and I wasn’t going to fall for it. Didn’t know the scheme, but I could see it, anyway, in that smug smile. I was sensitive to schemes now, wasn’t going to be taken again. That was my intention.

  “Think I’ll leave him alone for the moment, Father.”

  “Aye, a shame, John. Another day.”

  He stood up. A huge man, hands like knobs of oak. He walked to the head of my pallet, dipped a rag into a basin I hadn’t noticed, squeezed it, and placed it softly on my forehead. Water ran into my eye and it stung. He mopped that up with a dry cloth. I blinked. His fingers were gentle, and I was soothed against my will.

  “You made quite a mess back at that office of yours. I don’t think you’ll be welcome back there soon.”

  I wondered who had told him. Rintrah, obviously. Can’t keep secrets, had to remember that.

  “Why did you go there?”

  “I wanted your partners… are they Arobin and Felix? Alcibiades? I didn’t catch it. Charming, though. Felix needed a change of clothes. Blood on his shirt and so on.”

  “Why,” I growled to reiterate, “did you poke into my business?”

  He nodded his head and began braiding his beard.

  “Yes, yes, forgive me. The first reason is that Rintrah asked me to go over there. He told me your situation, and his answer to every trouble is to call for the priest, meaning me. It’s been that way for many long and irritating years. The second reason is that it seemed amusing and I welcomed the diversion from my regular duties.”

  “What use is a priest?” The cloth felt very good on my head. I counted the boards in the ceiling, not a single one gapped or bowed. I wondered how Rintrah reached up there.

  “I’ll assume you’re asking what use I might have been in this particular case, and not generally.”

  “Hmmm.” I felt myself falling asleep again. He changed the cloth and I noticed that he knelt on his knees upon the bare floor, which must have been painful for a man his size.

  “I thought it would be an amusement to tell Messieurs Felix and Alain… I hope I have that right… to tell them that you would not be calling the constabulary to report them for attacking you and vandalizing the office. I told them, in the considered opinion of a priest of great size and belligerence, that they might begin to make peace with their Maker by clearing out, not returning, and keeping their own counsel in these matters. I believe I told them, specifically, to get runnin’ and gag themselves, or I’d gag them for good.”

  “Why would they listen to you?” Silly question, I just wanted to hear the answer in his own words.

  “Sometimes I wonder, really, why anyone listens to me. It is because I am a priest, of course, and this is a town in awe of its priests, but really, what does that say about the state of our Church? It seems an impoverishment to me, this willingness of the herd to follow their shepherds without question, as if we had secret knowledge. I’ve found this tendency very convenient in my work though.”

  “And what is that work? I’ve meant to ask. Don’t see you in church much. Don’t have a church, right?” Why, I thought, should I be the only humiliated one?

  “I minister to the dying. It’s my specialty.”

  “And this includes acting as a thug?”

  “No, no. As I said, that was just for fun. And I wanted to see what damage a one-legged man could do. Very impressive, I should say. However, if you miss those two so much, it’s not too late to invite them back! Shall I go find them?”

  He knew the answer to that question, and he also wanted to hear me say it. He smiled. I felt around me, hoping my leg had merely been misplaced. I could use it to club him and escape. He was a strange man, getting bigger and more bearish by the minute. He made me anxious. Why had he helped me?

  “No, I suppose it’s best we all parted ways.”

  “Mr. Alcée… that’s his name!… said something about a stolen ledger.”

  “I don’t know what that might be.”

  He pulled the very ledger from the floor beside his chair.

  “Not this then? Because this makes very interesting reading. Had I been the poor, stupid sap buggered in these pages, debit by debit by debit, I might have broken a neck or two.”

  I drew myself up until I could sit. Father Mike, odd he may be, was an equal. I wanted him to see me full. Or as full as I could be at that moment, missing my leg and wrestling around among the blankets.

  “And you a priest? Breaking necks.”

  “Still a man, though I’m better than most at confessing my sins.”

  He left the room for a few minutes, taking the candle with him. Rintrah wheezed in the corner, a black lump in the faintest starlight. My anger had passed. All that remained was curiosity and emptiness. I had no more expectations.

  Father Mike returned with a cup of water and a jigger of whiskey. He stood over me while I drank, and he was still there when I slumped back down into black, dead sleep.

  In the morning Rintrah had gone and Father Mike sat in his chair, great head slumped over his chest and cushioned by the thick chaos of his beard.

  My leg lay beside me. It had been sanded and cleaned. I strapped it on and stood. Flights of small brown birds dipped past the closest window, tall and narrow and so clear I thought the birds might fly into the room and alight on our shoulders. I still did not know precisely where I was, I couldn’t remember all the turns Rintrah and I had made to get to the house. The room faced the courtyard, and into the distance all I could see were roofs broken periodically by the tops of trees drifting slowly back and forth, and drifts of gray streaking the sky above wash fires.

  I felt strong. I was strong. I am strong. Lord, I thought, I could stomp out there through the puddles of morning dew in the cobbles, past the wrapping vines concealing a hundred years behind thick and twisting arms, and through the city. I could beat and break my own path, straight and wide, no wall or alley or fence able to withstand me. This is what the city needed, a man to put the bulwarks in order, to clean the trenches and dig them afresh. How many men had been lost in those streets, tripped up, swallowed in blind passageways, disappeared through unmarked doorways?

  How could that house be so clean, and why would anyone care so much?

  “You’re up, lad, and clomping about like a draft horse. Reckon you’re feeling better.”

  Father Mike had arisen and folded my blankets without making a noise. I stood tall on my feet and still I had to look up at him.

  “Where is Rintrah?” He was big, but he was a priest and I was not intimidated.

  “Still like to kill him, then, the unnatural creature?”

  “No.”

  “Sure you don’t want to even kick him around a bit, have a little sport? Ah, he’d make a good sound bouncing down the stairwell, Help, Father Mike, I’m bumpity bumpity owww. Can’t say I haven’t thought about it myself, obviously.”

  Before I got to know Father Mike better and realized he was having fun with me and that, in truth, any man who raised a hand to Rintrah risked his holy terror and wrath, before I understood this particular priest’s peculiar methods, I became fully convinced of his insanity. Insane with the love o
f Christ, he would have said.

  The priest walked toward the doorway and beckoned me to follow. We walked down a hallway lined with cabinets, some containing dozens of tiny drawers labeled in French, others containing a few large doors big enough for a man to crawl into. At one end of the hall a small metal door had been fitted, like the door to a coal stove.

  “Incinerator,” Father Mike said, noticing my puzzlement. As if that answer didn’t raise more questions. Everywhere the floors were bare. The treads of the stairs were short, rising only a few inches at a time. Each landing had been reinforced underneath with cypress beams angled floor to ceiling. We walked up to the third-floor landing, so many tiny little steps. Four piles of wooden cots, broken down and stacked, rose from the landing to the ceiling. Hundreds of them. I heard a faint voice.

  “The boys are down this way,” he said, turning left down the long hallway cut through by bright, white light admitted through thin windows in each room. Every door had been opened, every window too. The place was being aired out.

  “What boys?”

  He said nothing, just kept striding down the hallway as if on the march, swinging his long arms and whistling. At the end of the hallway we turned into a room on the right away from the street. I expected to see Rintrah, but there was no one. Along the wall to the left stood piles of white washbasins, like the one Father Mike had used to cool my head, and also a couple dozen cases of what appeared to be whiskey. A violin leaned over in one corner, gathering dust.

  I was angry and confused. I had been led through a twisting rabbit warren of whitewashed walls and emptiness. I was no one’s plaything, and whatever Father Mike had intended, I wanted no part of it. But I followed.

  “Right through there, Cap’n.”

  The priest pointed at a small door in the wall. I kept looking and realized it was much bigger, only painted to look much smaller like a child’s door. The rest was disguised as part of the clean, white wall.

  “Father, this has become too tiring for me. I shall see Rintrah another day. Thank him for his company and trickery, which I will take up with him later.”

  Father Mike took a deep breath and turned to face me full. He bowed his head and for a moment I thought he might whisper a prayer. Perhaps he did.

  “Hood, I must insist that you accompany me into this room. Rintrah is in there, you may speak to him about his behavior yourself. But there is someone else with him you must meet.”

  He said must in the tone of a man who was making a statement and not a request. Then he opened the door and disappeared into the dark. From inside he called, “Follow or leave, bugger, but you will never know that woman of yours until you come through that door.”

  Presumptuous papist. I went through the door.

  Inside was an empty room, darker than the rest, lit only by thin, horizontal windows that I later realized were hidden by the eaves of the house and not visible from the street. A secret room, exposed rafters and beams and studs. I saw manacles attached to every other beam, bolted deep into the wood, awful and black and rusted.

  “What place is this?”

  “It was one place once, now it is another.”

  His mysteries were tiresome, but I would become used to them. They were Rintrah’s great joy. I looked toward the voice I recognized as the dwarf’s. He stood on his fruit box naked to the waist, an apron around his middle. He had posted himself at the side of a sturdy wood bed. There was a patient, a man entirely nude and unmoving. I had never studied a man as closely as I did this one. His skin was perfect, pale smooth and hinting at a color thwarted only by the darkness of the room. His legs and arms were long, his torso muscled. I couldn’t see his face. A fly walked up one of his legs and posted itself at the concavity of the man’s stomach. The man didn’t twitch, his skin did not goose bump. Rintrah killed the insect with a towel, leaving a quick welt on the flesh, and the man never flinched. Rintrah bathed him with a wet rag, never stopping except to wipe the sweat from his own neck and chest.

  It was not as hot in that room as I would have imagined. I remember the open windows everywhere. I didn’t understand the manacles, and I didn’t understand the scene at the bed.

  “Is he dead?”

  “I may be only a fruit man, but I ain’t a fool, General, and I don’t waste my time bathing corpses.”

  “Don’t smart off at me. I’ve got business with you.”

  He nodded.

  “He ain’t dead, that’s what I’m saying.”

  I felt the two of us falling back into our old banter, as if the events of the last day had not happened. I considered telling him what a pretty little nurse he was, but then he stepped down from his fruit box and I had nothing more to say.

  The man on the bed was not dead, by God. I saw his chest move and his eyes blink. He was not dead, and he was not entirely alive either. He was between worlds: between the living and the dead, and between what I had believed and what I knew.

  The naked man on the bed in the middle of the secret room of a rambling and strangely immaculate house, tended by a hairy and impetuous priest and a caustic and duplicitous dwarf, that man, that man…

  That man had been dragged off to be killed by a man called blackbird. I’d seen him go off to die. I’d heard him speak when he could still speak. He was the very same man. I knew his eyes and those long fingers. They grasped nothing now, moving nowhere.

  “And now you’ve met all of Anna Marie’s friends,” Father Mike said ruefully. “Too bad for Paschal.”

  There was a hospital at Franklin, where the hundreds died. Several of them, actually. They hadn’t been hospitals before I rode my army up into that town, but for weeks afterward those houses and mansions and churches were the refuge of the maimed and hopeless, my casualties, the men whose names we’d have to strike from the rolls. Their absence would be my handicap, my burden. When I walked through the Methodist church that cold day in November 1864, I was angry. Not at myself, never that, but at them. Them in their neat rows of improvised cots. Blood and piss ran between the floorboards, there were men who would never wake up from their slack-jawed sleep, there was a man missing his tongue and bottom jaw who flapped the sagging skin of his bottom lip at me.

  I studied their faces for signs of malingering. I poked men at their wounds to ascertain the degree of their pain. The churchwomen gaped at me and finally, tired of my harassment of their charges, took to rattling the bedpans against the bed frames in protest. Had they been my troops I would have had them locked up. Instead I left, disgusted. How had they let this happen to them? I remember thinking of the men in that hospital room. Why did they let it happen?

  I had spent my time in hospitals. I’d woken up in a hospital ward suddenly missing a leg. I hadn’t noticed until the nurse turned down the blanket to dress the amputation. The air had been foul, its stink and corruption nearly visible in the air wafting over me, but I would not despair of it. I had demanded to be sent back to my unit, I had demanded a leg or a post or a piece of kindling to strap on, I had left as soon as I could sneak away. I’d gone back to fight. I despised the sick and, truly, anything prostrate and passive. Such things—such people—were meaningless for being cast aside and passed by, for not being able to act on the levers and pulleys of this world, for not making the world submit.

  I can barely remember what is true about the battle at Franklin now, what I’ve invented or warped or twisted to protect myself. I knew that my saving might be in something as simple and small as making amends, making a confession, an apology. But I had been terrified of what would happen afterward, the humiliation and finally the forgetting, the anonymity. I did not want to be forgotten. I used to tell myself, I am a good man, I love my wife and my children, I am a good citizen, I was a good soldier, and so why should I be ridiculed and forgotten and judged? How few men have been in my shoes, yet how many would step forward in judgment? I wished to be left alone.

  And then I found the man in the attic, and immediately I had will for nothing else
but to submit myself to the levers and pulleys of the world, to submit to them and whatever I was called to do.

  I was, indeed, surprised to see Paschal alive, though in some state between life and death. I didn’t know his name before, of course, I knew him only as the victim of Sebastien, the tablet on which Sebastien had written his private note only I could see, only I could read: I am still here and I have grown large, greater than you can imagine. I was responsible for the body in the attic. It seemed a miracle he was not dead, but his living corpse was even more of a rebuke to me. I was still responsible for him. I dared to tell no one.

  That day I spent hours sitting with Father Mike and Rintrah, bathing the patient’s brow. Rintrah told me their story, about the orphanage and the very brutal way the two of them had made the acquaintance of the priest, who had not been a priest but some sort of Creole berserker back in those days.

  I learned the sleeping man’s name. They both described a man not made for this world, a grown man who believed in magic and pixies and beauty and grace, who refused the baser truths of this life. He played music, they said, that sounded like people whispering and giggling. He could spend a whole day eating nothing but squash, so taken by the perfect curve and color of the ripe yellow vegetables he bought by the basket from the Italian vendors in the French Market. He was puzzled by the idea that such behavior was odd. He believed it was only paying proper respect to beauty, and in fact was required of him. I watched him in the bed as they told these tales, and all that moved was his chest, up and down, the sheet slipping down his thin arms with each breath. Obviously a lunatic. A beautiful, chivalrous, and gracious lunatic.

  Still, I was responsible. I went back to my office high above Common Street. I stripped to nothing before lying on the cot under my office window. My body felt diffused, dissipating in the air like dust, reconstituting itself, changed. I wondered if Anna Marie would ever return from her parents’ house. Someone, Father Mike probably, had cleaned up my desk. My partners had cleared out, their desks were empty. Mice skittered in the walls, and I knew they were mice because the rats tread slower and liked to screech. The floor, old barge wood, was gray with age.