A Separate Country

by Robert Hicks

  “You always were a sucker, General. Steal or be stolen from, that’s the thing. I would have thought you’d learnt that already.”

  “I don’t accept that.”

  “Ah, I suppose it’s better you don’t, mate. You’d make an ass of yourself as a thief.”

  It was yellow fever season though I had no talent for nursing. I could not think of anything to say to those lying at attention in their cots, rigid and red-hot dry. When I felt obliged to say something I would turn away and go to the walnut blanket chest where we stored some of the linens I kept buying, and there I would polish the smooth, tight-grained wood until I felt the need to talk subside. I had come out of despair, found hope in a half-dead man, and stayed on in the hope of finding someone I could save if I couldn’t save Paschal. I gave every spare hour to the work at the house.

  I’m certain I lost money by abandoning the insurance office for hours on many afternoons, though I might have lost that money anyway, and I know I lost money buying linens I knew would be burned in the incinerator or buried with the dead. I begged Michel and Rintrah to let me tell Anna Marie about her friend Paschal.

  “She brings attention,” Michel said. “That mob will be embarrassed that he is still alive. Embarrassed they failed. Who knows what they do?”

  “She is not a gossip,” I said.

  “She brings attention whether she opens her mouth or not,” Michel said. “Her whole life. I know this my whole life.”

  And so when we talked of Paschal, I talked to my wife of a dead man who was still living. At times we talked about him at supper, barricaded from each other by those damned flickering candles and their shadows, and I heard the sound of genuine grief, and began to catalogue the characteristics, habitats, and subspecies of that grief. I heard a guilty longing for childhood, the wistful memory of the glittering and faceted world of light imagined in that youth, anger at the man who had turned a beautiful creature into mere meat before hiding him forever. These are all griefs, and from them I came to know Anna Marie Hennen Hood. I knew her mind as if it were mine when, her words in my head, I would go to see Paschal every once in a while and look into his face. She gave him life in those moments, he was not merely something destroyed and pitiful.

  I wonder, then, whether it was the circumstances of Paschal’s second death that lifted me into a murderous madness, or whether I would have strapped up and gone hunting in any case.

  What must a man have done to deserve two deaths? Or, I suppose, what is he owed in Heaven, what special provisions are made, after twice offering up his body to God and suffering the pain of death? I pray that Paschal Girard is comfortable now, and that the other seraphim look on him in awe and bring him grapes.

  He died once at the end of a rope strung from a pawpaw tree. It should have been his one and only death. But the tree was old, and though the branch was thick it was also rotted and dry. This would not have been obvious on a dark night even if Sebastien had looked closely, which I doubt anyway because I know the excitement of crowds that smell death; they push and urge, they are impatient. I went to see the tree several times after discovering Paschal in the attic, after Michel explained how Paschal had come to be lying there alive. The branch was at first yellow, slick, and jagged. Later it dried, the broken spikes at the edge of the break dulled into gray, dead fingers pointing. Michel told me he threw the broken part of the branch into the river, an accursed thing best carried far away.

  Who had sent word to Michel that night? He never knew. The colored boy who came to his door ran off after shoving the note into Michel’s hands. Michel had no reason to doubt the truth of it. He had told Paschal to stay away from those people, his people, the people who had raised him a cruel and violent boy who, only by the grace of God and his own fear, had found refuge in the Church. Michel knew they were charmed by Paschal, but only so far as people are charmed by trained raccoons. They would never take such a beast home, never make it theirs. They would eat it first, put it in a pot with savory and root vegetables. Paschal never understood this, Michel said.

  Michel rode out in his nightclothes, armed with a knife and a pistol, angry and keening. He willed the hanging tendrils of the tupelos to strike him, he prayed for the coach-whip snakes to drop on his head. He told me he wasn’t sure what he would do with the pistol, and considered the possibility of turning it on himself. Had I ridden up on that clearing in the woods, and seen him swinging among the pawpaws, I believe I would have died there with him. I was so tired.

  Instead, Paschal had fallen and was alive, as far as a man who can’t speak or move or see is alive, as far as a man who can only breathe and swallow and shit and piss is alive. In the clearing, lit by the dropping moon, Paschal was a pile of discarded clothing, arms bent back underneath him, his legs tangled in the creeper that choked the wood. The mark around his neck glowed red, and there were drops of blood seeping from the rope burn like honey from a comb. His face, Michel said, was neither calm nor agitated. Puzzled and disapproving more like, Michel said. Michel dismounted and walked over, expecting to see the distended and crooked neck of a properly hanged negro. Instead he saw the supple, blushing face of a living man and heard the rattle and rasp of a dead man taking his breath back. The branch had broken, and the noose had been tied loose, awkwardly. The cruel executioner had denied Paschal the quick death of a broken neck, and thereby saved his life. Saved some part of it, at least. Michel carried him back to Rintrah’s house on the front of his horse.

  Why did I care about all that? I felt guilt over the death of another man, that’s certain. Not for the first time, Lord knows, and I thought I was inured to it. I had walked over corpses during morning inspections and slipped in the blood of boys and old men twisted together upon the slope at that accursed place, Franklin, Tennessee. I had ordered the digging of many thousands of shallow graves that I knew would soon be unmarked and forgotten. This was my business, this was my profession. The dead were not human and had not lived. They were creatures best put out of sight and forgotten, abominations that would threaten a man’s sanity if allowed to live on in dreams, in diaries, in memory. And so I purged the dead and I never knew a man who kept his sanity during the war years who didn’t do the same. And if they didn’t forget the dead they would soon be dead themselves. They would wander about in battle without purpose or conviction, out of their minds, baring their chests before the enemy, charging into suicide. These were the men who quit talking, you could always tell. The Devil had their tongues, as they say. I am alive now because I refused to acknowledge death even while I urged men on to it. I cheated demons by becoming one.

  But this time I had created the killer as surely as if I had carved him out of chestnut. I had given him life and, later, when it was more convenient to be silent, I watched him do his work. That’s what a demon does, I suppose. But this man, Paschal, was alive again, and I had visions of angels. I could be an angel! He stared at me with eyes that had to be closed periodically and moistened with briny water. I thought he could see me and what I was, and that with his gaze he could transform me. I had been given a chance to reverse the course of my sin, a meandering creek with headwaters at the spot the arrow pierced my hand, a creek that had become stream, river, and ocean. If the last of the dead, if Paschal could rise again and suck back the life that had escaped him there lying upon the leaf mold among the crickets and beetles, if he could do that, why couldn’t the rest of them? I pictured a long line of men each standing up in turn and disappearing into the night. It was a comforting vision. All that I had to do was to save Paschal.

  We dismissed the servants, and I sold Lydia’s pony, Joan, to pay for medical supplies. I slept at my office. Anna Marie and I rarely spoke.

  She sent me a message, “To Be Delivered to My Husband by That Dear Bastard Dwarf Rintrah,” informing me that she was pregnant with another child. I heard about the impending birth of my son from a messenger. I spent some hours in the attic fuming to the silent Paschal about his old friend my wife, befor
e I was able to remember that last time I had gone to Anna Marie’s bed. I went home to see her and express my congratulations, but she was out in the garden pulling pokeberry and was too out of breath to speak. I told her a woman in her condition should not be out working in the heat, that the heat and the weeds and the bugs would ruin her child. I said, her child. She looked at me as she might look at an idiot slobbering on the carpet.

  “Nine children, John. Now ten. Please don’t start giving me advice now.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “About the child?”

  “No, about insulting you with my advice.”

  She viciously ripped a pokeberry out of the ground, accidentally pressing it awkwardly to her cheek where the berries left a red and thick stain like blood. She wiped at it thoughtfully and looked at her fingers.

  “Well, I, I the mother, I, am sorry about the child.”

  Two days later Paschal was murdered and I don’t remember much more about that summer until she was nearly ready to give birth, a great ball of a woman, crying and biting at my shoulder.

  I found him dead in his bed one morning, peaceful and still. On the bed, where I found Paschal with the pillow over his face, was a small arrow cut from a cypress branch, carved with heathen designs, its delicate leaves left on for the arrow’s feathers. The mark of a devil, if not the Devil.

  Suffocation, a pillow, a funeral. Rage. I waited for Lemerle outside his old cottage on Dauphine, knowing he would see me and that he would understand why I had come. He would want to know what I thought of his handiwork. Murderer. And so he walked out of the house and paused at the top of the porch stairs, eyeing me and pulling his black trail hat down close over his eyes. He disappeared down a porte cochere choking on clematis and trumpet vine and soon rode out on his crazy-eyed gray. He had his Winchester with him and I carried my Colt. He didn’t stop until he was halfway to Grand Isle, and when he did I had already abandoned his trail to make my own. I pushed through the scrub and wet, staying hidden, hunting him. Old broken stumps and sharp-thorned things cut my horse but she, good as gold, never whimpered. We tracked and plotted together. I could see for miles, I could hear the work of ants, I smelled viburnum miles before seeing it, I felt the vibration of the ocean against the earth a day’s ride away.

  I hunted a man. Time to end it. I heard his heart, the sound rattled the scrub pines around me. I pulled my pistol.

  I had let the man finish his work. I had let him sneak into that house, that holy and God-bright house, and desecrate it. I hadn’t only allowed it, I had led him there, I was sure of it. I had brought him to that house as surely as I had brought myself. He was a part of me like my leg, an appendage strapped on and redolent of the past, my bloody past.

  He stopped in an old clearing, probably part of an old fish camp. He sat quietly on the horse, not looking in any direction. He was listening for me. I had dismounted a quarter mile before, and now I stood twenty-five feet away, watching from cover behind an ancient oak. I heard nothing, not even the birds. Perhaps they had quit chittering, content to watch. I cocked that pistol, the snick of it echoed. He turned his head slowly toward me and frowned.

  “Come out, Johnny boy.”

  A man, an arm, a weapon, a will? I was condensed and simplified then, I felt the capacity for speech disappear. Unnecessary. There was only one thought. The hunter and the hunted, the creator and his mistake, the murderer and the inevitable vengeance that must, had to, fall upon him swiftly and without hesitation, or God was a lie. At the very least, He needed to be doubted and kept at arm’s length, if He did not mete out swift and fair punishment. I was willing to be His hand, and if He were to reject my offer, I would forever mistrust the pleadings of the faithful on behalf of Him, that He has a Plan and that we must trust that the Plan is good even when it seems utterly broken and nonsensical. I knew of Plans, I had thought them up and written them down, I had turned them into sound and fire. If need be, I would draw up another Plan and execute it to the letter, starting right then in that clearing with Sebastien, who leered at me from atop his horse.

  “Get down,” I said. I didn’t recognize my voice.

  “No. Shoot me down.”

  “I give the orders.”

  “I stopped taking orders a long time ago, Lieutenant. General. Mister. Américain.” He spit. “Mr. Américain, I like that. I shall call you that.”

  Then I had him in the air, falling into the soft swamp thatch. There is an advantage to being a gimp, and that is that no one bothers to notice your healthy parts. I knocked him off his mount with my good arm and cracked him across the skull with the pistol as he fell to the ground. He moaned.

  “Mr. Américain. You don’t understand!” Now he spit blood, hunched up on his hands and knees. “Mr. Américain, John, General, I admire you!”

  That enraged me, and I kicked him with my good foot. I didn’t understand why we were talking, why I had said anything to him. A bullet through the head had been the plan. I raised the pistol and slipped on my bad leg. We lay on our backs, face to foot. I kept the pistol on him.

  “Yes, yes, this is right, it is perfect. We have come the entire circle, coming back, you and me, we will settle this? Yes, we will! It is over, bless the Lord!”

  He confused me. I shook it off. I engaged my primitive mind. Pulled back the hammer again. Stood up.

  “Yes, yes, I did kill your nigger up there in the attic, I certainly did. You found the little arrow? Good, good. You knew who had done this immediately, no question. That’s perfect, that’s how it had to be.”

  I didn’t pull the trigger. He looked up at me out of the corner of his eye, smiling some, like he was glad to see me. I was disoriented, I felt the whole creeping swamp around me shifting, taking new angles on me, waiting for me to stumble so that I could be wrapped up and carried high into the treetops for devouring. Which one of us was a part of the swamp, which one was the agent of its will, its tooth and claw? I meant to be, but I didn’t know. He continued.

  “I don’t mean to call him merely your nigger, General Hood. I know who he is. Was. And I know that he is much more to you than a nigger. I know what kind of man he was, I knew him before that night at the ball. That is not something I’m proud of now, believe it or not.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “It is true, nonetheless. I have done two things these last few months, one that makes me proud and one that makes me think I shall burn for eternity, and both of them were for you.”

  The little slippery, greasy, backwoods hypocrite and liar. Put it on me? I was a god, the God of War and Vengeance, I could not be blamed. I did not move on a plane subject to the judgments of mortals. And yet I listened, listened as if playing with the mouse before biting its stomach out.

  “You admire me, and because you admire me you lynch a friend, badly, and finally come back to finish your work with a pillow? That’s admiration?”

  “Let me stand.”

  “You may sit.”

  He sat on his ass, his knees drawn up to his chest, rocking, still trying to get his breath back. I watched his pants go dark from the wet seeping up from the ground. He had scratched his face, or perhaps I had scratched it, but in any case the blood ran down his face in thin, straight streams and clotted near the edge of his mouth. He looked painted for Carnival.

  “I sit. And I say, I admire you, Hood, because you are saving yourself, though you were the Devil and you damned me, damned me, damned damned damned. You ascend to Heaven now. And I, I only, I wanted to help you.”

  He held up his hand not to protect himself but, it seemed, only to delay what he had already decided was the inevitable. Again I didn’t fire.

  “You had no business keeping that man alive, General.”

  “You botched the job, not me. I only helped to clean up your mess.”

  “Oh no, General. I didn’t botch, as you say, the job. I did it too well! I meant to tie that knot, and the knots on his hands, in a way so that he could slip out once we had gon
e. I told him, I whispered it to him. He nodded his head. I said to never come back, and he nodded his head again. He was a brave man, though a nigger. Among other things.”

  “The branch broke. That’s what saved him, not some absurd gesture of goodwill.”

  “Yes. I tied the knots too tight! These hands”—he looked down at them, caked in black silt and brown mud—“these hands are very good with knots, much practice. They work on their own.”

  “You’re a liar.”

  “If he could talk, he would tell you.”

  “That’s not at all funny.”

  “I mean it sincerely. If he could have ever talked, he would have proven my innocence.”

  “Then why string him up at all? What were you doing?”

  “That was for your benefit, Lieutenant. You could not intimidate me. If you were coming for me, I thought, I would rip your world apart, throat to gut, beginning with the octoroon spy you’d sent after me. He had no business there.”

  At that moment I successfully entered his world, distorted and blinkered as it was, and understood what he had done. He was describing a demonstration, a feint, something to scare me away. Why would I come for him? I suppose he assumed I felt guilt for Texas, for chasing down the Comanche, that I would need to have him killed. I didn’t feel guilt, but he thought I did. He thought it. He felt it. He was a better man, if more brutal, for crediting me with an emotion I should have possessed but did not. I did not. I thought I didn’t, anyway.