by Robert Hicks
“So why would you try to spare him?”
“I am not an animal,” he said, showing me his hands. Thick, horny skin broken by ragged calluses. “And I had begun something, I will admit, that I couldn’t stop without risking my neck. Things get out of hand, slip away. They get bigger than what they’re supposed to, and far worse, no? And I became angry when you pretended not to know me. Me!”
He was raving now, spitting out the sides of his mouth, trying to get it all out before the inevitable. He clutched his knees. His legs were entirely covered in dark mud. He looked like something just emerging from the swamp.
“And then why would you kill him?”
“Because he was my responsibility, and not yours. I had made him that way. He collapsed on my march, and had to be left behind. All you and your midget and your priest had done was extend that man’s pain. Not enough to live, not enough to die.”
“He showed no pain.”
“Life is pain. If no pain, there is no life, and yet you wouldn’t release him. How do you know what he felt, did he talk to you? Make hand signals? No. So I did it for you. You didn’t have the guts, and I do. Perhaps you were afraid, or sentimental. The kindest thing was to let him go. You never did understand mercy. Never. You left it to me to end the pain back in Texas. I put an end to the pain you caused. But this time it was pain I had caused and you were prolonging it, perverse bastard, and so I took control. And I did it knowing you would come after me, so here we are, and I am about to die.”
I raised the pistol.
How had Father Mike found us? And why hadn’t I heard him? He must have ridden behind me, and yet I hadn’t noticed. I had been so intent on my quarry, I hadn’t heard a giant priest on a mule clomping behind me. But now he stepped into the clearing and I finally understood the stories Anna Marie had told, the stories of the brawler and the sensualist, the boy who made men afraid. Here he was, older, the sleeves on his shirt rolled up above the elbow, his forearms near as big as my leg. My good leg. He stepped between us and we both looked up. His hair, always long, was now wrung with sweat and whipped about his huge head. He glared down at both of us, but mostly at me. It was impossible to imagine him presiding over the Eucharist. He looked fit only to preside over the wrestling of alligators.
“Put the pistol down.”
“I won’t.”
“Fool, I’ll take it from you and make you eat it.”
I lowered the pistol.
“Give it to me.”
Sebastien called out, desperately. “Show me the mercy! End this now, Hood. The pain! Don’t listen to him!” But I could see in Sebastien’s eyes that he was relieved, that he knew he wouldn’t be dying today. Even so, I didn’t hand over the pistol.
“What about Paschal?” I asked him.
“Paschal reconciled himself to the Church through me, he has been relieved of his sin, and now he is at peace. And now I’m here to make sure that another of my friends, though I’m not sure why I call you friend, that another of my friends doesn’t do something very stupid he’ll regret later. You are a Christian? Then I command forgiveness from you in the name of Jesus.”
“You’re commanding me?”
“It’s the language you speak, unfortunately.”
And then he had the pistol. I don’t know how he moved so fast, but first it was in my hand, and then it was in his, a tiny thing against his palm. He pocketed it.
“Are you otherwise armed?”
“No.”
He lifted Sebastien up by the back collar of his shirt, like a man picking up a kitten, and fished through his pockets. Out came four knives and a small-bore pistol. These went into Father Mike’s pockets also.
“I followed you, John, because this man is damned by you, but you can still be saved. God is here, God is right here. I will help you see Him, but you must forgive. I will help you, but you must ask. There will be no more killing today, or I will break my vows and have my own vengeance. I hope I am not being ambiguous.”
Then he walked into the woods and, a few minutes later, I heard his mule clop-clopping away, back toward the city, like some country friar off to talk to the birds. He made me afraid, he awed me. I never thought to follow him, and I never thought to ask him about his appearance in the swamp that day. He was some other kind of being, something born in the muddy woods to which he returned. When I saw him again he was just Father Mike, but in the swamp he was mysterious and lethal, like the alligator.
I went over to a log and sat down.
“What will we do now?” Sebastien said.
“Reminisce, what else do we have?” I said.
And we were there for three hours. After some time I relaxed. I tended his cut, and tied up his horse, and holstered my weapon. I spared him. My head flooded with thought, language, the complexities of expressing life in words and sentences. I was no longer the General, and I hoped the General was gone for good.
The city disintegrated around us, and we knew it to be our fault. Reconstruction was over and we had not been reformed or reconstructed. Men had become, perhaps, more vicious for having thought of themselves as the conquered for so long. We were the conquered, as General Lee said, and we owed obeisance to the conquerors. If only the conquerors had possessed greater will, for now that they were gone, along with their Freedmen’s Bureaus and their garrisons and their sham legislatures, our people asserted themselves brutally, as if they could take back what was lost and more, as if they could make time reverse itself.
Sebastien had hanged a colored man no blacker than himself, and had witnessed the burning of the colored school in the Vieux Carré a few weeks before. The appeasers and collaborators, the Republicans and the other opportunists, kept their heads down. The White League—old French Creole reactionaries and other white Southern nationalists—met and plotted in the open. Elections had become occasions for battle, and we had endured the ignominy of two competing legislatures and governors set up in nearby hotels. My friend General Longstreet had been trapped in that conflict, and had made the impolitic—if also honorable—decision to denounce the violence and the resistance to Federal and Republican rule, and he lost his position in society and his insurance business. The rest of the Confederate generals in New Orleans—Hooker, Beauregard, and me—knew enough to keep our heads down, to bide our time, and for my canniness I was given General Longstreet’s insurance business. Let it not be said that cowardice is without reward.
So here we were, fighting the war again and again and again. When I mentioned this to Sebastien, he nodded. He’d been to Shiloh, he’d ridden with General Forrest at Fort Pillow, he knew what we’d done. I don’t know, Hood, if I’m suited for a world where there ain’t killing to be done. No sir. And I told him that was my fault, and he nodded his head.
Things that weren’t my fault: disease, heat, floods. At the periphery of the city the cannons sounded each night at dusk against the coming miasma, that unseen mass that carried yellow fever and malaria and cholera and houdou things. I told Sebastien that the report of the cannon made me flinch, and that its echo rang in my ears long afterward. Firing out into the night at the unseen and unknown. That seemed right: we were a city under siege, cut up and slowly murdered from within and without. All we had was the river, and Lord help us if it quit carrying the packet boats and the barges to us.
“The cannons,” Sebastien said, touching the clotted blood curtaining his cheek. “The cannons are my friends. We can still fight, that’s what they say to me.”
“I don’t care if I never hear the sound of a cannon, or a rifle, or a pistol, or a sword unsheathed, ever again.”
“That’s not what I would have expected you to say, General.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, what else do you really know?”
“I am a husband and a father. I know that. I sell insurance.”
“Are you good at any of those?”
I paused to think about that. Might as well be honest.
“No.�
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“What else?”
“I take care of sick people when I can. I buy things for them, blankets and medicines and such. I help.”
“And that? Are you good at that?”
Another pause. It crossed my mind, not for the last time, that I might have spared myself much anxiety and trouble had I just killed him outright like I’d intended. Was I good with the sick? Was I a healer?
“No. But I refuse to fail at that. I refuse.”
“But your wife, your children, your business? You do not care?”
The admission, finally. I could make it, now that my quarry had become my counselor.
“I don’t know. I don’t think about those things so much.”
“But disease, yes? Disease you think about often.”
“Always.”
It killed without discrimination, and death by yellow fever was excruciating. It came on the body so suddenly that even in death the victims seemed incredulous, unbelieving. They were healthy, walking the street and chasing their children, and then they were down. I cannot say whether it was my experience of war that drew me to the diseased, or the disease that helped me understand my war. In either case, I had been overcome by an obsession. I could not tolerate even one death, and yet I was bedside for hundreds. Each death brought me one step closer to Hell, I was sure of it, for they were my fault somehow. I had never stood on a battlefield holding the hands of the dying or burying the dead, the men whose last moments had been conceived and ordered by me, and yet I could not leave the diseased alone, and every rattle and rasp, every towel of sputum, every pine box, I added to my own tally, which was the tally of my transgressions, the things I would have to explain to God. I never turned my head to the heavens and thought Why? because I knew there was no sense, just as I now knew there had been no sense in my pursuit of the Comanche, or in that bloody charge at Franklin. It was all part of my lot, the bringer of endings, blithe and stupid destroyer. I told Sebastien none of this, but I had the feeling he could hear my thoughts. He looked at me kindly, and this frightened me.
“I don’t want to see you again, Sebastien. I’ll kill you next time. Or Rintrah will. They were friends, he and Paschal.”
He blanched for a moment at the mention of Rintrah’s name, but only for a moment. He patted my shoulder. I wished he could stay, that I could allow him. It wasn’t possible.
“Not if I see you first, friend. But you’ll not see me in the city again. Only in that next life.”
He mounted up, picked a scab from his face, and wheeled around and out of the clearing. He may have been my closest friend, or at least the man who knew me the best, and I disliked him some for this. Even so, he was spared, and I wondered if God would credit me that mercy. I don’t know what difference it would make, but I like to have the books square, the maps precise. Not that it ever did anyone, me least of all, any good.
I didn’t love the disease, the dying. I loved Anna Marie. How could a maniac have seen that while I remained ignorant of it myself? I mounted up. I sensed the last battle approaching. Be proud of me, Anna Marie.
When I returned to town, I rode straight to Rintrah’s house. Rintrah and Father Mike sat in a small pantry they’d made into their war room, the secret room to which only a few were admitted. They bent their heads over a pine-stick table, rickety and bowlegged, on which Rintrah had laid out a sheaf of papers. They looked up when I walked in, they nodded, and turned back to what I now understood had been an argument.
“Can’t do it, Michel. There is no money for this.”
Standing around them were three colored men, two of whom I recognized as Houdou John, Father Mike’s friend, and the coachman who has worked for Anna Marie’s father so many years, George. I didn’t recognize the third colored man, but everyone in the room, even Rintrah and Father Mike, deferred to him and called him Mr. Plessy.
“You mean,” Mr. Plessy said, “that there is no money you would spare.”
Rintrah narrowed his eyes at him. “Don’t get any ideas, Plessy. I’ve been very generous. Look at this house, it’s a blasted storage shed for colored castoffs that even your people won’t look after while they die, so don’t be getting high and mighty with me. I’ve done put down plenty of money for you people.”
He said this nearly without anger in his voice, which he kept soft and steady, as if still trying hard not to offend even while offending. I wondered who this Mr. Plessy was, exactly.
“We all have made our sacrifices, in our own ways, this is why we here today together,” said Houdou John, always the peacemaker. I leaned against the wall and tried to remember his last name. I realized I never knew it.
“Who is this?” Mr. Plessy nodded his head at me, as if I were a servant.
“That’s Anna Marie’s husband, the General Hood,” said George, looking at me nervously. I didn’t know his last name either. Mr. Plessy nodded his head.
“Your wife knows my stepson, Homer, General Hood,” he said.
“I know nothing about that. Anyway, I am here on other business.”
“I reckon you have the same business here as the rest of us do, General Hood.”
I stood up straight to register his impertinence, but he wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at Father Mike and Rintrah, who had stopped fiddling with the papers in front of them and had looked up at me.
“Perhaps you do,” said Father Mike. “Have the same business, that is.”
“We might have a proposition for you, Hood,” Rintrah said.
And so, though I had intended to tell them I could no longer spend my days and nights there at the sick house, that I had obligations as a husband and a father at home, I listened to their plan. I listened out of friendship and respect, but at first I had no intention of seriously entertaining any scheme for any purpose that would require me to be away from Anna Marie and the children anymore. I had been shamed by a killer into recognizing my obligations to my family. Then, as I listened, and the perverse brilliance of their plan unfolded, I couldn’t help but be drawn in to their madness.
They intended to spirit from the city as many colored people as they could come high summer, when the yellow fever would be at its height. Father Mike had become tired of always tending the dying, and I came to understand that Mr. Plessy, Houdou John, and George had become tired of burying their dead.
Escape from the city during the summer had always been the luxury of those with money. They had the carriages, the servants, and the houses up north of Lake Pontchartrain where the yellow fever nearly never appeared, and when the summer was over they would return to the city as if they’d merely been on a holiday and not in flight for their lives. They never saw the city that was created in their absence, the suffering, the heat, the constant parade of coffins, the despairing insanity of those who had nowhere else to go. That was not their city.
Father Mike and Mr. Plessy, I learned, had decided that it would no longer be the city of the poor colored either. Where the others had their houses and breezy verandas and cooks and maids up north of the lake, Rintrah had his fish camps, where he had been storing his goods for many years. And in the city, he had his fleet of hearses.
“You got the perfect setup for moving people out of the city,” George said. “It ain’t like you never moved contraband before.”
“They ain’t contraband, you can’t just stack the poor bastards up like pallets and bottles,” Rintrah said.
“They aren’t contraband?” said Mr. Plessy, to no one in particular.
The problem was the money, always the problem in everything. Rintrah had the means to move people out of the city, and a place to send them where they could stay a couple months, but he didn’t have the money. He would lose all the money he’d be making moving liquor instead of people, first off. Second, most of his men wouldn’t likely have any part of it, and the rest would want an unconscionable amount of money, more money than he had in the world. “They ain’t going to take kindly to the idea of moving negroes out of the city
ahead of white men,” Rintrah said. “And neither will anybody else in this damned city.” The rest of the people in the room nodded their heads sagely, and yet they persisted with him.
I suggested that they move poor blacks and whites, so as to partially assuage the concerns of Rintrah’s men. Mr. Plessy chuckled bitterly.
“That might make things easier on Rintrah and his boys, but it wouldn’t do a lick of good for us,” he said. “When it came down to it, no white man, poor or not, is going to let a nigger go on ahead of him, and so we’d have riots and the only way to end it would be to take the whites out first, all proper like, and when that’s done, and once the whites had taken up all the fish camps, what would we then do with the coloreds? Half them be dead by then anyway. That’s not what this is about. Understand me, General Hood, I am here for my people.”
“And what about those whites who have no way out either?”
“They better get to planning and scheming they ownselves, I do believe. They on their own.”
So, the money. When Rintrah looked up at me and said, We might have a proposition for you, Hood, this is what he meant: he wanted my money. At that point, I asked if I might be excused to talk with Rintrah and Father Mike in private. Mr. Plessy, Houdou John, and George filed out slowly, watching me, and went into the hallway, closing the door behind them.
“This is not why I came here,” I said.
“Nevertheless, it’s the question at hand,” Father Mike said.
“I don’t have such money, such resources.”
“But, I believe, the Insurance Association of America does.”
“That’s not my money. That’s someone else’s money, that’s everyone who’s bought policies.”