A Separate Country

by Robert Hicks

  “It’s money, and it’s in your possession,” Father Mike said, leaning so close I could smell the vinegar on his breath. Collards. “They’re going to break you with those policies, we all know that. Your business is just about done, anyway, we all know it. They’re going to bleed you dry with their claims. All those riverboats you insured, all that cargo? All those profits? They’re gone and you know it. This is a plague city, friend, there isn’t going to be any business here soon. And they’re all going to come running to you for their claims, for some money. So you got to decide, who gets that money.”

  “It’s a matter of honor, Father,” I said.

  “It certainly is.”

  I promised to think about it. Rintrah snarled and said I’d have a week to decide, or else they’d have to scrap the whole idea. In the confusion of it all, I forgot to tell them I was leaving them for Anna Marie and the children. The point had become moot, I guess.

  I began to get up to leave, but Rintrah held me back. His strength, the size of his hands, was always surprising.

  “I have other business to discuss with you, Hood,” he said. “I know what you been doing.”

  “Calm down, Rintrah,” Father Mike said. “Just ask your question and get it over with.”

  Rintrah sucked air into his cheeks and blew out. He looked me straight in the eye.

  “You went after him. You went after him without telling me. Without my men.”

  “Yes.” I saw no use in lying about that.

  “What happened?”

  I did see some use in lying about that, however.

  “He’s dead.”

  “Where?”

  “I said he’s dead.”

  “Sebastien Lemerle is dead. And you killed him.”

  I didn’t answer, I only returned his stare. I was tired, and my heart had gone black momentarily. Rintrah looked at me suspiciously, but then relaxed.

  “That’s it then.”

  “That’s it. It’s over.”

  I walked out, nodded to the three colored men lined up along the hallway, and mounted out for the house. Rintrah was weeping the last time I saw him.

  CHAPTER 17

  Anna Marie Hood

  John never told me about what he’d done to Sebastien Lemerle. I heard about it much later, and even then I never told John what I knew. I decided that if he didn’t want to tell me about it, he had his reasons. I’d come to trust him again, don’t ask me why. I will admit this, though: I was ashamed. Or, rather, I was saddened by the realization that what I had prophesied in that café, something I thought was the most terrible thing I could utter, this oath I had sworn in anger on Sebastien Lemerle in the presence of another ugly and laughing killer, that those words of mine had been made hard and true. I was shocked to know that my husband could kill a man. Is it odd to say that? Yes, I was shocked that my husband, the Confederate, the man known even among his detractors as a vicious fighter, could end one particular man’s life. I was responsible, I thought. I had wished it to happen, I had prayed for it, I had uttered the words, Sebastien Lemerle will die. And so he did, and I was not at all unburdened by that knowledge. I was not set free, I did not feel that there had been justice. It just seemed one more killing, nothing greater, and did not bring any greater order to the world. Perhaps this is why I never mentioned it to John: I could neither bring myself to congratulate him or condemn him.

  He came home afterward. It took me three days to realize he meant to stay, and that he wasn’t running out the door to carry water for Michel and Rintrah. It was unexpected, Lydia, not least because I had come to understand, I thought, his obsession, and I had been prepared to accept it. Instead he bumped around the house, noticing things for the first time in many months. He saw that the oil was out in the lamps, and he rode off to get some. He fixed John Junior’s door, which squeaked. One day I watched him from the doorway as he slowly spun around in the middle of the living room, as if memorizing it, crinkling his brow now and again when he saw something new, or something old he’d never bothered to notice. He tested the red upholstered chairs, all three of them, and the blue couch, unmatched but comfortable, and spent the rest of the afternoon leveling the legs with a plane. He was very neat, I noticed. Meticulous about picking up the wood shavings. Then he took a nap.

  He carried you around on his shoulders, Lydia, like he used to, hunting spiders and wren’s nests up in the eaves of the porch. He lingered after supper, even as the sun went down and it became dark, and we talked. Not the talk of giddy lovers, but talk between a man and a woman who had been tested and had decided that they could not go through with the days alone. This was love, too.

  I didn’t ask him why he never went to the office, I was too glad to have him at home. He seemed preoccupied in his quiet moments, and at night he mumbled to himself. I have obligations, I have made promises. I thought he was talking about us, you and me, Lydia, and the rest of the children, and so I would put my arm over his chest and draw myself close. We slept in the same bed for the first time in several years, without any discussion.

  Should I have questioned his return, should I have forced him to explain it, to justify it, to argue why he ought to be let back into my bed? Should I have made him prove himself, should I have forced him to make various admissions of fault and sin and recklessness and coldheartedness? Another woman might have made him earn his way, but I thought I could see in him, and feel in the knots of muscles in his back, that he had already earned something, that he had already suffered for his absence. Had I wanted to be right, I would have made him argue his case. The truth, though, was that I just wanted things whole, this family and this man and our bed.

  I let my fingertips drift across his chest, stirring him only just enough to set the nightmares flitting off into air and nothingness. I would soon learn that his obligations weren’t only just to the family, but in that moment I was particularly content.

  On the fourth day John went over to Bayou St. John with John Junior, and they brought back five large catfish. The fish lay on the back porch slowly turning from dark blue to gray while John showed Junior how to skin and fillet the big cats. We ate fillets fried in cornmeal and pepper, with okra from Rintrah. The okra came with a note to John, which he didn’t show me.

  During supper, and after you children had left the table to play among the weeds and vines in the backyard while the sun still shined, John kept pulling out the note to unfold and fold again, each time creasing it tighter and tighter. He looked at me over the last few of our candles, and he cleared his throat.

  “I have a decision to make,” he said, stroking at his beard as if he could yank it off and become someone new. “Or, rather, we have a decision to make.”

  The words themselves were enough to make my heart beat in my throat. The confusion in his face nauseated me. Perhaps I had been wrong to think that he had changed.

  “Yes?” I sat very straight in my chair. The candles blocked his face at the other end of the table, and so it seemed that his voice came out of the flames.

  “I have not been entirely honest with you,” he said.

  Another woman. I was silent, my hands clawed at each other in my lap.

  “I am a failed businessman, now twice over.”

  I was so relieved, I nearly said, Well, of course you are, darling! I thought better of it. “Oh dear,” I said.

  “I have failed you and the children, we are on the brink of disaster. I never cared much for the numbers, the money. I was foolish. Soon the insurance company will have paid out all of its capital in claims, which are coming all at once because of the damned epidemic that seems about to break open here in the city. Did you know,” he said, spearing a piece of catfish as if it had personally thwarted him and his plans, “did you know that up and down the river the boat captains have been instructed not to stop in New Orleans for fear of taking aboard the contagion? The cotton docks are nearly empty, same as the molasses sheds. And now the factors and the traders and the importers come to m
e, their insurer. They have their hands out and demand to be paid so that they might continue to live as if nothing has happened.”

  I kept staring into the flame, looking for meaning in this talk of his. I understood what had happened, but what decision was there to be made?

  “This is what you do, of course? Pay out money? They are not wrong to ask for it.”

  He leaned back in his chair, hands behind his head, looking up at the ceiling where flies and other insects had left their trails. I could see his face, and it had suddenly relaxed.

  “I need to clean this ceiling tomorrow,” he said. “It looks as if someone has tried to draw a fresco up there in insect shit.”

  I giggled at his profanity. It was a weakness of mine. He looked toward me, searched for my eyes.

  “Yes, that is what I am supposed to do. I am supposed to pay out such claims so that rich men may remain so. I do not insure poor men against poverty, only wealthy ones. I do not insure poor men against death, only the ones with the money. On and on.”

  “You sound like an old abolitionist all of a sudden,” I said. “What have you against the society men, the people with money?” I had plenty to hold against them, but that was personal. John was talking as if there was something more basic at stake.

  “Perhaps I do. In any case, I have been asked to think differently about my job as an insurer, and to consider turning what money is left in the company over to another cause entirely.”

  The note from Rintrah. Of course Rintrah would be involved.

  “And that would be?” I didn’t care much what he did with the company’s money. If we were to be bankrupt, what did it matter how it happened. Soon I would learn that it mattered quite a lot.

  “Father Mike, Rintrah, and several negro men have made plans to evacuate great numbers of coloreds, those who could not afford to escape otherwise, from the city before the epidemic gets much worse. They are sick of watching these people die, Anna Marie. It looks particularly bad this year, and so they think this is the year to secretly move these people out and away from the yellow jack.”

  “Secretly?”

  “They believe that they would be prevented if whites found out about it.”

  “And they need money.”

  “All of it.”

  I had yet to tell John about the day I watched the family of Paschal’s cousin die in their tiny Treme cottage, how I washed their feet and how Homer had fitted them with shoes. I saw them now. I had never been the same person since, and yet I had not told John. I had kept it to myself. I was possessive of them, those moments standing in that dark room, because I had not been the same woman ever since.

  “Where will they take them?”

  “To Rintrah’s fish camps, north of the lake.”

  “By horseback? Cart?”

  “Rintrah’s hearses. No one bothers a hearse, Rintrah says.”

  Rintrah’s hearses, Rintrah’s sense of humor.

  “So you will give them the money?” I assumed he would, simply because he was having such trouble deciding what to do. The John Bell Hood I had first known would not have hesitated, he would have paid the claims of the insured and let the rest fend for themselves. If he hesitated now, it was because he had changed also, and powerfully enough to overcome a lifetime of subservience to authority. He just needed a little urging. I felt no hesitation, I cared nothing for the money, but if it could keep another father, mother, and daughter from dying alone in a dark cottage foraged by thieves, then I thought there was no question what had to be done. John was shocked.

  “Anna Marie, think.” The excitement in his eyes betrayed him.

  “Are we too good to be poor?” Had little Anna Marie, daughter of the great jurist Duncan Hennen, flower of a thousand balls, just said such a thing? I had.

  “No, we are not too good to be poor. But the children! And if I were to abandon those insurance claims, any hope we would have of finding a place in society again, where a general and his lady ought properly to be, would be ruined. They would bear that grudge against me, who gave away their money to negroes. We would be lost to them.”

  Perhaps it was the staring into the candlelight, or perhaps it was simple anger. In any case, I felt the edges of my sight closing in, red spots floating in front of me.

  “I give not one damn about those people. Where are they now? Where are they with their money? Do they help us? Do they even come to see us? And what do they do with their money? They build monstrous, half-empty pillared homes while across the city men die, and then when it’s convenient they run their carriages over the unmarked graves on their way out of the city. Dying of the fever is not for them but for the benighted and unlucky. I say to hell with them and their money.”

  John stood up, came around the table, and took the seat at my right hand. He stared into my face as if he were watching a new species of insect unfold from its chrysalis. Something dangerous.

  “You don’t believe that.”

  “I do.”

  “These are your friends.”

  “No longer. I have none, except for you, and these children, and Rintrah and Father Mike. And had I been thinking correctly, as I am now, I would have still had my friend Paschal, I would not have allowed him to be offered up like a lamb at the sacrifice.”

  His face turned stone hard. His sky-blue eyes burned hard, almost becoming gray in the low light. You stumbled in then, Lydia, to show us a clematis bloom as big as a dinner plate, and when you saw us you slowly backed away. Do you remember that?

  “I cannot afford the luxury of being so flippant about our responsibilities and future.”

  “Flippant? You know as well as I do that I speak the truth.” I had passed some test, some point, and now all I could think about was getting rid of that money, giving it away. It was dirty and it tainted us, even if it wasn’t ours to give away. I could sense the anger in the room and it made me desperate.

  “And now, Anna Marie, that I understand your point of view and what you wish for me to do, I believe I need some time to consider the matter alone.”

  He stood and went for his coat. It was all I could do to keep from jumping up and wrenching the coat away from him, to keep from dragging him back to the table and tying him there so that he would not leave again. But I had to let him go. If he could not see the truth of what I had said, and if he could not see the true path, the righteous path, that he had been called to take, there wasn’t anything else for us to say, and certainly no future together that needed protecting. The last four days had been nearly perfect, and they would remain so even in distant memory, if it came to that. I watched him thump down the steps of the front porch and unhitch his horse.

  Four days later I opened the door to find the giant priest waiting for me. Father Michel. Father Mike. My old, clumsy, strong friend.

  “Anna Marie, why is this door locked?”

  “Good afternoon to you, Father.”

  He pursed his lips and crossed his arms. I must have acted drunk, and he sniffed my breath. He shook his head and gathered himself up like a proper priest. He had come for other business.

  “John has sent me for you and the children.”

  I now noticed the large four-in-hand in the drive behind the house, captained by a bored seminarian perched up on the box.

  “Sent you? Why, then? And why you? Has he lost the use of his other leg?”

  I hated myself for saying such a thing about the man I loved, but I was not entirely whole at that moment, as I’ve told you before.

  “He is engaged in the sick ward and cannot get away at the moment.”

  “Bah.”

  “And he thought you’d more likely listen to me than to him.”

  I do not know when the tears began to slip down my face, and I only became aware of them when Father Mike stepped over and put his arms around me. I buried my face in his cloak, which also smelled of lye, like John himself.

  “You must all leave the city. You cannot give birth in this city, Anna Marie, ho
wever stubborn you are. Look at your stomach, that balloon! That child could come any moment, and he must not come into the world with the fever everywhere. It is very bad this time. Believe this.”

  Ah, Michel. So tender and so primitive, a rough sculpture of a man who had never ever become very comfortable with other people and their passions, so afraid of his own. Thank God for the Church. And now he stood in my foyer, no longer the satyr in altar boy’s robes, but a man pleading for my safety, concerned for my health and the health of my children, no leering anger, no bravado, no threat. He dressed modestly now, his clothes loose and threadworn. He had quit cutting his hair long ago, and his beard had become long. He had banished his vanity, the pleasure he had taken in his powerful body, his fists, his cock, his mastery of the brutal side of men. Now he breathed out only a kind of true love, rough and innocent and pure. He had become a priest after all.

  It felt as if we were all coming to the end of something that had begun nearly twenty years before in that swamp, when Michel and Rintrah and Paschal and I had come together. Whatever had been set in motion that awful night was coming to its final stage, and either we would pass through and be forgiven, or we would fail and live always in fear and doubt and regret.

  “What of the others?” I said, showing Michel to the blue couch. He sat at its edge nervously rubbing his hands, which flaked skin from a dozen calluses.

  “What others? Who do you mean? We have no room for others. Your friends will have to fend for themselves, I’m afraid.”

  “You know who I mean.”

  He knew who I meant, but I think he was surprised that John had talked of them to me, and more so that I cared.

  “I do not know what the plans are for them. We shall see. I have come for you and the children, it is imperative that you leave now. The others we can talk about later.”

  “I’m not leaving without knowing that they are going also. I want to know those plans you claim you don’t know.”

  We had not mentioned their names, who they were. The coloreds, the negroes, the field niggers, the octoroons. I sat down in one of the red chairs, newly solid on its legs, and crossed my arms as if I was perfectly willing to stay in that seat forever. Would I have put the children at risk to make my point? No I would not. But I was ready to die myself, and if not for the life growing inside me, I might have done just that. I sat on my seat, immovable and insistent, because I wanted Father Mike to know that I had changed. I wanted everyone to know.