A Separate Country

by Robert Hicks

  I thought I could disturb Father Mike with questions. My eyes said, Had Paschal been here? Was he afraid? Did he die alone? I had assumed he was cast into the river and never found, but now in the mysterious world of the church, I had begun to have my doubts. Here were the nuns who had raised Paschal, and the man who had beaten him nearly senseless on meeting him. And there, on the altar during the service, had been the paschal candle, the Light of Christ Risen. None of it meant anything. It was not unusual that Father Mike would conduct a funeral at the convent, and perhaps the sister had mistaken me for grieving family. The candle was not Paschal. Even so, the mystery of what had happened to Paschal after he disappeared into the woods, and why, and who he really was, became an obsession that day.

  I did disturb Michel. He puffed out his cheeks and let his jaw drop as if he were staring at something horribly deformed. Some of the sisters brushed by us and tittered at the big priest once they’d floated by.

  “Do you know anything of Paschal?” he said.

  “He died. He was murdered. He was never found.”

  “Then why would you look for him?”

  “I’ve begun to have my doubts. Because that is not a complete answer.”

  I turned my back on him and left him standing there in the hall. When I turned the corner toward the motherhouse, I looked back and saw him still standing there, eyes closed.

  It comforted me to pretend it was his body in the coffin. I pictured him there, his body blessed, his death properly mourned. I preferred the lie to the truth, which was that he had disappeared and been subsumed in the air and soil and water, little parts of him floating through us, breathed in by us forever, never seen. Now I had seen him offered to the Lord and I was happy.

  Even so, I was still angry with the sisters. I would not be treated as an impertinent dog. Nuns did not frighten me. I’d known religious all my life and, anyway, Michel the Terror had become a priest. They all had feet of clay. I hurried toward the room of the mother superior.

  Sister Mary Thérèse, I discovered when I pushed through to her small office chamber, was the tiny and dried up little woman who had first shut the door in my face. She did not look surprised to see me. She betrayed no expression, or perhaps it had become impossible to form an expression with a face crossed and chasmed with so many lines: worry lines and laugh lines and crow’s-feet and an impressively beetled brow. Was the absence of expression what one called beatific? Hers was a face only God could love, and I suppose she knew that.

  She greeted me by name.

  “Anna Marie Hennen Hood. You are a persistent woman. A blessing on you, child!”

  Her face remained only a puzzle, but her thin, rasping voice sounded genuinely pleased with me.

  “Sister, I’m confused. Why have I been allowed here today, after being barred so rudely? It’s troubling, Sister. I wonder what you’re up to.”

  “Up to nothing, dear. Persistence is sometimes rewarded. The first time we met, I did not know you, and when you mentioned poor Paschal’s name, I had no reason to trust you. Surely, knowing what happened to him, you can understand the mistrust. I am still trembling to think of it.”

  Behind her head hung a thin crucifix. The emaciated Christ hung limply except for His head. I had never seen Christ’s face turned to Heaven. Every crucifix I had ever seen portrayed Christ at His death, His head hung in temporary defeat. But this Christ was fierce, His eyes burned. It scared me.

  “Sister, I suppose I should tell you my business.”

  “Oh, I think I know your business. I’ve learned much about you, chère. You would not have been admitted otherwise. I know your friendship with Paschal and that little devil Rintrah, and I know about your husband, this Hood.”

  Spied on by nuns! Did they follow me, or did they have informants? This was a desperate and treacherous town, but even the nuns? Ah, darling, there is nothing sacred.

  “Perhaps, Sister. Or perhaps I just want to know what happened to him.”

  “Surely you know. You were there. Or so I’ve been told.”

  “Yes. But I only saw him dragged off.”

  “And you watched.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you did not stop them?”

  “What could I do?”

  She stood and gathered her missal. There were prayers to be said, psalms to be sung.

  “I believe you must answer that for yourself before I can tell you any more. Please see yourself out. You may come back tomorrow.”

  I wanted to stop her, to grab her, to make her answer my questions. I could feel the tears burning behind my eyes.

  “You mean I should have died instead.”

  “Come back tomorrow.”

  And she disappeared through a small door behind her table, off to prayer.

  The hell I would come back the next day, or any day, at the direction of the old woman. I was the hope for the species, I had done as the Lord had instructed and brought forth life. I didn’t answer to barren old women married to the unattainable, the unimaginable. I was too new to marriage and motherhood to know what I meant by these thoughts, which dogged me the next few hours while wandering the streets of the old quarter. I was not too naïve to realize what bringing forth life had meant after bringing forth life for ten straight years. Still, there was the ache of superiority. I flounced in and out of the milliner’s shop (where I demanded they make me a dress), and knocked over a colored boy with twelve pairs of shoes around his neck, tied in perfect small knots by the laces. I sat in the café behind St. Louis and had a snuff of port. The old men leered at me and I was repulsed by them when once I would have been pleased. I no longer accepted any idea of myself that was not my own. I suppose that was what I had wanted to tell Sister Mary Thérèse, but I didn’t have the words.

  One moment the café rattled with laughs and dry coughs and shouts, and the next it was quiet. I was too busy sipping my port and watching the liquid ease down the side of the glass to notice at first. When I looked up, the dozen café loungers were each staring toward the bar, where stood a man with scars on his neck. Bad skin, rotted and pitted. In his hat he wore a yellow feather. He was a common sort of dodger, poor hat and worn soles flapping against the bar rail. He ordered two drinks for himself, both amber and thick in short glasses. Both went down quickly. The fascination was a puzzle to me, but the two old men beside me who had been watching my legs leaned together and whispered loudly an explanation.

  “It’s Hector. He looks as if he’s been busy, no? I believe it is time to leave, friend.”

  This Hector, I understood, had killed two colored teachers at a local colored school during the recent White League riot. He was a killer, a hunter of colored flesh, the one old man told the other. The attack on the school had happened the week before. Colored, Creole women teaching colored, Creole children their French lessons and their piano lessons. Huh? what’s going on now? she didn’t see it, did she? is she imagining, remembering, what? [It was reported in the newspaper, it was spread as gossip, she heard it from a cabdriver. She could have heard it any number of ways, and the way is not important. I’m starting to get irritated now.] I turned up Dauphine and saw the air melted by the fire and the children waving from the top floor, jumping out, falling and falling. The women had been murdered first and laid neatly in the foyer in their blue dresses and white aprons. The children had no one to help them. Such a great victory for the White League, though they somberly denied that those were their thugs, their torches and knives. What did it matter? This was their city, and that fire was no contradiction of that fact. I took a wrong turn and tripped over a man playing cymbal in the street and singing wordless songs. I thought I saw something black flash by at the edge of sight. Something black and liquid. I thought I was being followed. I heard no screams, only the rush and snapping of fire. There could be no more dreadful sound. The children’s shouts burned and were carried up in the fountain of ash, unheard.

  “Thank God for him, but I would just as soon he stay on that
side of the room. Or on the other side of the city,” one of the old men chuckled. Here was a man who acted on impulses they only indulged between glasses. I knew them, these strangers. They plotted without acting, lectured without understanding. The colored man’s time was over, it was agreed, but let others attack the women and burn the schoolhouses. Others not fit to share their liquor. Who did I despise more, the murderer or his audience with its clean hands? I don’t know. The two stood, donned their felt hats, and walked out through the arched doorway into the glaring afternoon light where they disappeared until next time.

  The man called Hector took his seat at their table. He twiddled the yellow feather in his fingers. I looked for blood on him, some stain that could not be sloughed off, but of course there was none. Unlike the old, recherché Creoles, he didn’t stare at the sight of a woman alone in the café. He looked everywhere but at me. He nodded at some of the others but said nothing. I know he must have felt my eyes on him, but he only remained hunched over his two glasses.

  I was back at the ball, only I was watching the moments before Sebastien took hold of Paschal, before Paschal had been seen, before the urge to destroy had taken hold. There he was, just sipping his drink. No rope, no cruel jokes, no insanity. It was before I had caused the death of my friend. Everything went back to that night. I was angry, I was about in the city searching for Lord knows what, I had observed the requiem for a stranger, I had berated a nun, I was drinking in a café alone.

  “He’s going to die, you know.” I spoke without intention, or at least a plan.

  “Pardon?” He slowly turned his face toward me. It had been slashed on his left side, his neck scars were livid with the first flush of alcohol and looked fresh again. His eyes were gray, his eyelids drooped. He had no interest in me, not as a woman or as a companion in the café.

  “Do you know Sebastien Lemerle? He is someone like you. He is going to die.”

  “And what is someone like me?”

  I raised my voice so the others might hear.

  “A murderer and a devil, bound over for Hell.”

  No one looked at us, but everyone listened.

  “Murder is a matter of opinion, madam. Though I don’t know why you would call me such a name, in any case.”

  He was coy, playful, like a cat. He waved his yellow feather toward me, feigning to tickle me. He was enjoying himself, he knew precisely what the others in the café thought of him.

  “The school.”

  “A terrible injustice.”

  “Yes. Yes it was.”

  “Giving those girls hope, that’s a crime. Not murder, but bad enough. Hope of being white, of having white things, of thinking white thoughts. They tease the dumb creatures.”

  I had nothing to say to that, I barely understood him.

  “He’s going to die.”

  “Lemerle? And who shall do the killing? I have no particular love for Sebastien, but I wonder who wants him dead? He is a hero to some, and certainly he can take care of himself.”

  He had leaned toward me so the others couldn’t hear, but I nearly shouted my replies to foil him, to embarrass him. When he looked around the room he did so apologetically, as if he were concerned for the opinion of these men for whom he was a necessary monster.

  “I am the wife of the General John Bell Hood, of the late Confederacy.” The words echoed in the room, as if I were announcing John’s arrival.

  “My! General Hood! I would pay to see that, though I believe the cripple would be at a severe disadvantage.”

  I threw my port into his face, but there was only a drop left and he licked it off his lip.

  “Your husband must be a very courageous man. But I must ask you, Why don’t you kill him yourself? You drink like a man, and talk like one, and you issue challenges like one. I wonder about General Hood. He has his woman going about the city drinking with men and making threats on his behalf. It is strange.”

  I stood and brushed past him without a word. The owner of the café walked over to the man Hector and told him to leave. He had watched the whole conversation without intervening, I suppose for his own amusement. Of course it wouldn’t do to have a murderer without chivalry in the café.

  The murderer didn’t follow me, though I thought he might. I heard him laughing as he walked down the alley past the church before turning down toward the Place de Armes.

  I walked back toward the convent. I nearly called out for Sister Mary Thérèse to come save me from the cold Hell I had begun to glimpse in each crack of slate banquette, in the gawking, nattering, toothy, passing bursts of yellow and red and indigo who jerked past as if hung by string and twittering on about the weather and the Opera. It was Hell that had been waiting for me all this time. How many years sitting in the window of my mother’s room, watching men and ladies and horses go by down the avenue? How I had believed in their grace and goodness, the warm and fascinating righteousness of their lives beyond our garden, how I had imagined a wide, wide horizon. I had dreamed of this even in those days after Michel’s behavior in the swamp, even after knowing how he had ended the one possibility of escape for two who had so ardently wished for it themselves that they had left the pious women who had saved them, the women who I hoped would save me now.

  I took the correct turn, straight toward the convent, and then I knew I was being followed. Women in black glided past cisterns and under dark galleries. They knew what I had done. They closed in, sweeping toward me, faces white and featureless.

  Then I was at the convent door, shouting Sister Mary, Sister Mary. I could hear the sound of my pounding echoing down the stone hallway. I waited for the ghosts to set upon me, but Sister Mary Thérèse opened the door before they could pull me back.

  “I killed Paschal.”

  “Surely not,” she said. She stood before me in work habit, brown homespun and bare feet. The hem was wet as if she had been cleaning something.

  “He was there at that ball because I told him to go there.”

  “You invited him.”

  She took me by the arm and marched me into the chapel out of the hearing of the others. I had surprised her, and she was not used to surprises. She knew me, she had thought, but now? The back pew was rough-hewn and different from the others, full of gouges and sharp edges, and I could see where distracted nuns had scratched crosses and crude cats and bleeding hearts lightly into the wood.

  “Yes.”

  “To cause trouble.”

  “Yes, but not real trouble.”

  “You get to choose? You play with your friend like he’s something you bought on the street, and then you think that you can choose what happens when you abandon him?”

  “I never abandoned him.”

  “You abandoned him like he was just another nigger to you. This is the house of the Lord, child, do not blaspheme with your lies.”

  “It’s more complicated than lies.”

  I thought she didn’t understand my point. But she pressed on. Her face cracked and split as if to release something terrible within, terrible for her. Anger, violent thoughts.

  “You stupid girl, you are no mystery.” She shook. Her pale brown hands gripped the pew until they’d turned white. “And you know little about the man Paschal, this man who haunts you, the man you called friend, the man you used as a pawn in your silly little games. Oh, I know why you invited him, do you think Paschal does not talk to his old mother Mary Thérèse? Hmm. In the end, you cast him off and confess your guilt. I suppose you want absolution? I cannot give it. You know nothing. You don’t even know the person to whom you’re confessing.”

  Just as quickly as she’d spit that out, she recovered herself. Her face gathered together again and became unreadable. She put her hands in her lap and lowered her head, mouthing words. When she looked up again she reached over to hold my hand.

  “Why?” She sincerely wanted to know.

  How could I tell her that, late at night, I felt the horror and shame of not knowing my man entirely, not unde
rstanding him completely. I had married a man who had led an army. I was horrified that he had killed, that he had likely whored, that he was both the bearer of news from the outside and its cautionary tale, broken and brooding. What kind of man ordered other men to their deaths? I imagined he strode through the underworld like a prince when the light went down and he was out of the sight of proper folk. Where else could such a man find a home, who had ridden over bloody roads and watched the deaths of boys and old men? I believed this was the reason I had been snubbed, removed from guest lists all over the city, looked on with pity. Fine, I had thought, but you all aren’t without your little shames either. And so I had set out to remind my cousin of her own shame, just in case she had forgotten.

  This is how I thought of my dear friend: a shameful dalliance, something to be ashamed of, an embarrassment. I had changed. I had become a horror to myself.

  How to tell a nun this? I coughed out something and she seemed to understand. She twisted her hands in her lap and got to her feet. I wanted to ask her what she meant, but she was gone. She walked down to one of the front pews and knelt, genuflecting in long, sweeping movements from her head to her chest to each shoulder. She entered a pew and knelt, her hands clasped before her, elbows on the pew in front. I don’t know why I stayed, nor why I, too, got to my knees and prayed to the Holy Mother. There were moths in the air above the tabernacle, drifting up toward the window in which Christ reassured His mother and Mary before leaving them again. He was always leaving, I thought, and no one thought to comfort those two who had always waited for Him. I watched the back of Sister Mary Thérèse’s head, and I could see she was praying furiously, working her rosary and pausing now and then to talk directly without the beads.

  I was staring at the Resurrection window when the old mother superior appeared again at the end of my pew.

  “There is someone you should meet. I will get her. You’ve come for information about Paschal. Don’t ask her anything, she won’t answer. But you should meet her.”