A Separate Country

by Robert Hicks

  It felt like those moths orbiting the head of the Magdalene had temporarily taken residence in my stomach. I read that somewhere in some jungle or bush the natives believed that the place where a child first stirs is a place that marks the child’s character and destiny. A new understanding of the life I’d chosen, bound in its old and hard-spun chrysalis, first stirred in the back of an old convent chapel while nuns brushed quietly by down long stone hallways. I hope that means something.

  It was the red-faced nun who had brought me to the Requiem Mass. She stood over me and then sat down at the very end of the pew and did not speak. She only looked at me, and then to the candle at the altar still lit from the Mass. She looked afraid it might snuff out, or more likely, that I would snuff it out. She was tall and green-eyed, and only by looking closely could I tell that she was much older than I’d first thought.

  “Who are you?” I said.

  She only shook her head.

  “Why did you bring me in here earlier? Why did you let me in at all?”

  She stared wildly at me, as if she were trying to get me to do something. Her eyes never left my face. I looked at her hands, long, elegant, and supple fingers on calloused palms. Farther up her wrists I studied long, thin, faded old scars. I looked up in her face and it was Paschal who looked back at me. Paschal’s face, his nose and eyes, his laugh lines, his sad mouth.

  When she saw that I understood, she stood and left me alone again.

  John was not happy that night, one of his rare appearances for supper. I suspect he came to supper only to confront me. How did he know the spectacle I’d made at the café, or what I’d said? I didn’t ask. On my way home the streets had filled with gawkers staring at the crying woman walking straight and without sound. I passed them without looking, but I noticed the boys running between the bananas and the fan palms, off on errands I couldn’t guess. I suppose some might have carried the news of my disintegration to John, no doubt scratching at a ledger with his pencil or lounging in the winter of the ice makers. Or they might have merely offered news to the network of clubmen and potbellied traders who, I knew, would pass the word along without fail until it was known by all. I bought shrimp from an Italian woman and she smiled sadly at me when she handed over the tightly wrapped packet of soggy, fishy newspaper. A woman could not have a secret, so why bother to hide tears, or anger, or a slight wobble in the step? I’d have as much luck hiding a goiter. That’s what her smile said.

  Mother, who had been looking after the children during one of her brief sojourns back into the city, boiled the shrimp for supper. The house on Third Street seemed older than it had three weeks before. The two great bay windows on the second floor like eyes in a pale red face, a white gallery at the front like a yawning mouth. Sitting with my husband for supper was no longer new. The flatware was not new, the china was not new, the crystal not new, especially not the old glass I insisted remain at my place, carried over from my parents’ house. The mosaics of yellow candlelight upon salmon walls, so light and trembling, reminded me of the butterflies my father and I used to collect a lifetime before. Here I was the wife and the mother. Out there, across Canal Street and among the Creoles, the mud was deep and I was always who I had been.

  I don’t know exactly how, but your father could eat anything without getting a speck of it in his beard. His sad blue eyes always stared down at the table at something a few feet in front of him, usually the salt dish, and with that beard his entire aspect at table was that of a daydreaming, fastidious Moses. He had once been a great talker, and more romantic than I had imagined, but his eyes never lifted from that point in front of him on the table. I wondered if there was something beyond that point, something beyond the table and the floor and the earth that he could see, something that he wouldn’t let go. When he was silent for days, I was convinced of this. On those days he seemed to make his own weather. No candlelight could illuminate his face, nor dance upon the walls. This was untrue, of course, but it’s what seemed to be true.

  That night, when he finally looked up from the tarnished salt dish and points beyond, he said I had most offended him by implying that he was a murderer, a vengeful man.

  “I do not seek out men for revenge, I do not kill because my wife, or anyone else, tells me to.”

  Oh, such cant! I thought. You don’t do it now, now that I need you.

  “I know,” I lied.

  “This man, this Sebastien Lemerle, as I’ve heard he is called, he will not like these threats. And as you and I both know, he is a dangerous man.”

  I watched him speak, the gray and the black of his beard moving back and forth as he spit the words out, and I could tell that fear did not bother him in the least. He was lying.

  “Surely you’re not afraid of him. I am not.”

  He brought his good fist down on the table, making the candles jump and gutter.

  “Do you think,” he snarled, “that we are the only two in this city? That you are the only one I am responsible to protect? That we are the only two he might wish to harm?”

  I had no earthly idea who he was talking about. His eyes drifted off again. He seethed. I thought he might weep.

  “Just keep your mouth shut about Sebastien Lemerle. I do not want my name and his uttered in the same breath. Ever, by anyone.”

  “Don’t talk to me like that, John.”

  His head drooped and his shoulders hunched.

  “It’s important,” he said. “Just remember that it’s important.”

  In the long hours after supper John sat out on the front gallery sipping an old cognac, one of several his old friends from the army had sent him after our wedding. They were squat little bottles that he lined up in two small rows upon the sideboard. They were each different, but he drank them in turn, on down each row as if one was the same as the next and it was his duty to treat them without favor. Had I not spied him through the porch window nodding gratefully at the passing menagerie on Third Street, holding a glass and cigar in one hand and propping his bad leg on the rail, I might have fallen out of love with him that night.

  CHAPTER 14

  John Bell Hood

  My days became alike. I left the house, I went to the attic, I stood vigil, I wiped Paschal’s head and neck with a wet cloth, I fed him tepid soups and watched him swallow unconsciously. I looked for signs of life, waking life. I quit going to the office entirely. I left word of where I could be reached, and occasionally Alcée rang the door and left papers for me to sign before scurrying off under Father Mike’s glare. They were invariably papers authorizing the payment of claims, and I signed them all without inspection. I did not care to argue with anyone with a claim against me, even though I knew the money wouldn’t last. I was involved in more important things, I thought.

  Sometimes Paschal moved, and at first I would limp out of the attic and down the stairs to summon Rintrah or Father Mike, who trudged dutifully up the stairs behind me, leaving the first of the season’s sick lying on their cots, rigid like cordwood in the throes of their fever. I hardly noticed them, only the smell, which was sour and peaty. Each time they followed me into the attic and watched for a few minutes as Paschal twitched and then lay still, and then they’d leave me alone again. I came to learn that the body is not entirely ours, and sometimes it does as it pleases without our knowledge. Paschal never woke up, but I stayed there, watching the silhouettes of the windows meander around the room from morning to night.

  Father Mike argued with me.

  “I don’t understand why you come,” he said to me after three weeks. We stood out back of Rintrah’s house, in the overgrown courtyard. Untended banana trees browned and crumpled at the edges, and the orange trees gave up tiny, mean little fruit. The house was enormous, and from our vantage point I could tell that the sick ward was not its only function. Across the courtyard from us I could see the shadows of men walking by windows, carrying great, heavy boxes here and there. I could hear the faint sound of glass clinking. Someone kept shouting pr
ofanities, and every few minutes I could hear the sound of a horse cart pulling up on the other side of the house, out of my sight. Father Mike said Rintrah had won the house in a card game when I asked how an orphaned fruit vendor could find himself in possession of such a house. He didn’t bother to gild his lie, he seemed tired. I decided the men in the other part of the house carried the explanation, but I didn’t much care. I didn’t care for anything but that attic.

  “I come because I’m supposed to come, that’s the best I can explain it, Father,” I said.

  “I think you are not right, you’re touched in the head,” he said.

  “You and Anna Marie,” I said.

  He looked quick and hard at me, and then looked up at the roofs, a brief smile on his face, like he was remembering something.

  “She is not a stupid woman,” he said. “You should not worry her.”

  He removed his boots and let his big yellow-tipped feet dry out in the sun and unbuttoned his shirt to his waist. He was unselfconscious about himself, like a dog.

  “I would like to tell her what I do here, but you’ve sworn me to secrecy,” I said.

  “Why don’t you do what you tell her you do? That would solve the problem.”

  “I should take marriage advice from a priest?”

  He blew air out from his cheeks.

  “What you should do is notice what the hell is going on around you. How many sick do we have in the ward?”

  “A couple dozen?”

  “More. Do you know any of their names? How many coloreds?”

  I didn’t like being quizzed, but I answered. He was commanding, compelling. He could have been a general like me, I thought. He would have never stooped to that.

  “I don’t know any names, I’ll admit. I’d say half colored, half white.”

  “All colored. And their names are Antoine, Jeremiah, Lucille, Katharine, David, Nicholas…”

  “I understand.”

  “No you don’t. If you did, you would leave Paschal alone and help us with the sick who actually know pain, who know what is happening to them, and that they are dying. You would help with that. Instead you have made our friend Paschal into a voudou fetish, something to protect you. You are weak.”

  I slapped him then and was on my feet. The sun burned the back of my head, and in the bright light I saw the red come up in his cheek. I was once his physical equal, and if I wasn’t anymore I could still make him hurt. He shrugged.

  “Slap me, shoot me, stick me with a bayonet, it’s all the same to me.”

  And then he walked back into the house, barefoot and bare-chested, leaving me standing under the banana tree.

  I didn’t spend all of my time in the attic. I spent some of it at Mr. Rouart’s ice factory, watching the ice form on the pipes and letting the chill restore my calm. I took walks. I usually arrived home very late.

  On one of those walks a few days after Father Mike’s lecture, I stumbled across the funeral in Congo Square. I watched women dressed in white smocks and white tignons leading the coffin, and the men in white following behind with the coffin on their shoulders. I heard wailing and shouts and watched mourners prostrate themselves in grief. And at the moment when the coffin was raised up to depart the square for its final journey to the colored section of the cemetery, the wailing became more intense. Men and women strained to place their hands upon the coffin one last time, and when the coffin finally departed and the crowd was left behind, I heard the cries. Cut the body loose, cut it loose! I hadn’t noticed the drums, but immediately they began to pound a syncopated rhythm that each of the mourners picked up and set down. They whirled and shook, jumped and laughed, sang and grimaced. One of the mourners, a woman about Anna Marie’s age, twisted her hips and held her hands to the sky, spinning and gyrating, her eyes closed and her mouth half open as if letting a ghost escape through her lips. I was mesmerized. She was so beautiful and so terrible, terrible for having her beauty brought out by death. Where did she come from? Why is she here? And then, Where was she when my boys were dying at my command?

  I knew nothing about death, only killing.

  I walked back to Rintrah’s house, light-headed and preoccupied. I didn’t go straight up to the attic. I sat in one of the sick rooms, where fourteen people lay on cots in two straight lines. I sat across from an old colored woman, her skin as thin as a moth’s wing. Her nose and mouth and throat were inflamed and swollen, and I thought that if the fever didn’t kill her starvation surely would. Even so, her eyes were clear, and they stared darkly at me. I silently confessed my sins to her. How I had betrayed, how I had brought chaos to a world with no shortage of it. How I had brought unexpected death, tragic death, death without sense. I had struck without warning, and there could be no resistance. I had helped to design these deaths, and I helped to spread them. And when the dead lay on the ground, I had ordered shallow graves and then a march onto the next killing.

  The sun filtered through the long curtains of white linen that had been drawn against the heat, and I imagined the woman across from me might be swallowed up and lost in the diffused light and weightless dust. She seemed so insubstantial at that moment. I became agitated. I watched the willows and the tulip magnolias gently shake outside, casting shadows across the window, the room, the woman’s face. I had always thought that willows were beautiful, and they were no less so in that moment, but for the first time I noticed their imperfections, their asymmetries and browning leaves. I blinked and when I looked again I thought I could see every wrinkle in the bark, every vein in every leaf, and the segmented bodies of every insect upon them.

  The woman in the bed moved. Drops of perspiration ran down her temples. She reached up and, with some effort, pulled a long brown braid from behind her neck and stretched it out upon the pillow next to her, letting the air cool the back of her neck. I watched her lie back and die.

  The next day I didn’t go up into the attic. The man on the bed in the attic was not the man who had been killed, he was not Paschal, but some other man made of the same flesh but residing in another world. My business, my penance, was to be had in this world. My business, as it had always been, would be to fight.

  CHAPTER 15

  Anna Marie Hood

  After my argument with John, I decided the next day to take my father’s carriage back into town, since we had no horse ourselves and no working carriage. I wanted to wander far, and so I called for my father’s driver, George. I was five months along with the baby, I could still get out when I wanted, and I wanted to ride hard, to slip through the air and the miasma and the muck and not be touched by any of it, I wanted to see all that I had missed and was missing. For the first time in that city I felt an outsider.

  Paschal’s mother was a nun. A red-faced, silent nun. She had perhaps even raised him without his knowing. She had cut her wrists. Every day he had lived as an orphan with his own mother nearby. I could not possibly understand what that had meant, I knew that much. It was a tale bigger than anything Paschal himself had ever spun about himself, and far more true.

  We careened down Esplanade and over Rampart until we came to the big trees at Royal. George cut the reins hard and we swung to the right, slowing to squeeze down the narrow street. Women in coarse brown frocks hurried down the street with loads of vegetables in grass baskets strapped to their backs, intent on the market. Had I eaten their vegetables? Would they have recognized me as anything but someone who ate vegetables? It would have never crossed their minds to ask such questions, I knew. Negro men swept the gutters and the sidewalks, and negro women in purple, yellow, red, and blue tignons shook rugs and sheets out windows, as if hailing a parade. Negro men in heavy boots and thick trousers scaled roofs to repair slate. I didn’t know where the slate came from, nor did I know how it stayed there laid upon the steep roofs, and why the roofs did not slough it off at once. Negro women hurried lazy white children along the sidewalks, steering them around harm and toward the errand of the day. Negro men drove the horses that ca
rried the people who watched. Like me. Negroes everywhere.

  Toward Dumaine we rolled. I looked back at the scene on the street. I watched as the wheels of our carriage spit mud and water and all manner of corruption up into the air and onto the fresh sidewalks.

  I stared intently at the back of George’s head, which did not move while we rode. I knew this was a matter of pride for him. His body absorbed every jolt and dip, every violent wrenching of the carriage by the treacherous street, and still his head never wobbled. I tried to think of the last time I had seen his children, and I couldn’t remember it. Where was his wife? I had never met her. Did he have one? Was she alive? I didn’t know. There had been no wedding invitation, at least not one for me. What color were George’s eyes? Brown, certainly, but what shade? I knew the back of his head better than I knew his face. The back of his head was broad, and curved gently down to his thick neck. There were often bumps beneath his skin where he had shaved his neck. There was one dark mole on the left, and another that occasionally disappeared on the right only to reappear months later. His hair curled tight against his skull, and gray hairs had begun to make their way up and through the black. The gray hairs were lazier, less tightly wound, wilder. I saw where someone had snipped the stray hairs back to a manageable length. George had been with my father for thirty years, and like my father, he was vain.

  The carriage twisted sharply to the right and onto the sidewalk, scattering a pile of trash and a box of oranges. I flew against George’s broad back and he held me back with his left arm while gaining control of the horse with his right. A boy had dashed out in front of our carriage, and we had almost run him right over. He carried some shoes around his neck tied together by their laces. He stood in the middle of the street, his boots in a puddle, entirely undisturbed, as if he had expected our carriage to come along and run up on him. The shoes swung against his chest, and for a moment I thought they would drag him down. His skinny white legs looked too thin to hold him up, especially with the shoes knocking about and swinging. There was no fright in his eyes, and what’s more, he stared straight at me, unblinking and unflinching, as if trying to see something about me. As if he knew me, and I him. He was not afraid of me. I saw this, and then I guess George saw it too.