A Separate Country

by Robert Hicks

  “Yes, he has. I am sorry about your money. But you done good, you done a Christian thing with that money of yours, and ain’t no one with sense gone to fault you for that. Not me.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Why are you here? Have you come to see Eli? He ain’t here, he’s in the card houses.”

  My business was with her, not Eli.

  “Do you love him?”

  She scowled. “I ain’t thought about it, and it’s no business of yours, no matter who or what you are.”

  “That’s true. I just wanted to make sure someone cared about him.”

  She walked to the pitcher and poured herself some water. She sat back down across from me.

  “We talking as women? Not fancy lady and poor Irish whore?”

  “Yes.”

  “I care about Eli Griffin, more than I care about anything else. I don’t always know what he cares about, but I care about him. Yeah, I reckon I love him, too, though I ain’t at all sure what good that’s gone to do him or me. He’s getting hisself lost in this town, he may know cards and grifting, but he’s as innocent as a lamb. Naïve, sure as I sit here.”

  He was not the first man I knew who had been described as naïve about the city. I’d married the first one.

  “Does he love you?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “I believe he does.”

  “Then you’d be a smarter lady than me.”

  “Don’t let him get lost. You know what I mean. Lost in this city. Don’t let it happen.”

  “Got no way to stop it.”

  “You can. You’ll know how when the time comes. Help him then, don’t leave him be.”

  “You a seer? Because I don’t reckon you could know the future otherwise.”

  I drank from my cup and tasted the tin. It made the water crisp to the taste. Outside the wharf gangs shouted and unloaded. I finished the water and decided I’d better go. I’d said what I’d come to say.

  “He loves your General Hood, that’s certain,” M. said, so softly I thought she might be talking to herself. “Hated him once, now he loves him. He’d die for him now. Strange how it all comes out.”

  I slid my chair around the table so that I was sitting next to M.

  “Don’t talk about dying.” She’d begun to cry silently. Her head drooped a little, and only her shoulders shook.

  “Got it on my mind, Mrs. Hood. But you don’t want to know that. You came to visit with Eli’s whore, tell her what to do and how to live.”

  “No, that’s not why I came.”

  Her face had turned red, and her eyes shot open.

  “Then why did you come?”

  I knew the answer to that question, I’d been rehearsing it during the entire walk down the river to the apartment. I’d been thinking about it since Mr. Plessy described for me the last days of my friend Paschal Girard, the other orphan.

  “I came to save Eli.”

  “From what?”

  “From being abandoned. I suppose I’ve failed, but at least I said it. Now I’ll go, thank you for the water.” I pushed my chair back to the opposite end of the table and walked to the door. M. held her head in her hands.

  “You walked all the way down here just to say that?” she called without looking up.

  “Yes. I don’t have much else to do anymore.”

  She stood up and smoothed her dress in front of her. It was a more modest dress than I had expected. She looked ready to chase children and tend chickens.

  “It was good of you, ma’am.”

  “Please call me Anna Marie.”

  She nodded her head and, reaching behind me, unbolted the door.

  “I don’t know what you mean for me to do, but I reckon I’ll do it.”

  She paused to hear what she had just said. I smiled.

  “That may be the most beautiful thing I’ve heard said in a long time,” I said.

  The sun was setting when I walked back to the house. I walked along the river and listened to the slap and crumple of the waves against the bows of the riverboats headed upstream. Across the river, in the wilderness of Algiers, some houses poked through the trees. Men on the quay stood back as I passed. I was content with all of it, even the mosquitoes that landed on my arms and on my neck, soon covering me with red welts. I didn’t brush them off, I let them go about their business. They were God’s creation, too, after all.

  When I came in the house, John was in his library crumpling paper and swearing. You, Lydia, were telling the other children bedtime stories you’d invented about gnomes and lions and peanut vendors. I went into the library after kissing you all good night.

  “John.”

  “You’re back. You look parched.” He was scratching at a piece of paper. At his elbow lay a growing pile of sheets covered in his tight letters, and at his feet a bigger pile of crumpled paper mounded against his legs like windblown sand.

  “I think you shouldn’t give that book to Beauregard to read.”

  “It’s too late, I’ve already done it.”

  “Not the war book.”

  “Then I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “The other book, the one you’re writing right this second.” I stamped my foot and pointed. I felt giddy, like a child. He slipped the paper to the top of the pile and then tried to move the pile into a drawer as if I couldn’t see him. “That book, John.”

  “It’s not a book.”

  “I think you should give it to Eli to read when you’re done, and let him work to get it published.”

  “Why would I do that? Assuming, for the moment, that the book you’re talking about exists.”

  “I think he’s the only person who would care enough to do it.”

  “Well, it’s moot, because it can’t ever be published. And what does Eli know of publishing?”

  “Probably nothing, but he can figure it out. Why can’t it be published?”

  “There are problems with it.”

  “Have Eli solve them.”

  His eyes drifted to the window, where the mockingbird was fledging her two babies. She was unusually quiet.

  “You’ve read it, have you, Anna Marie?”

  “No. And I don’t intend to read it.”

  “How do you know, then, that Eli would want to help me with it?”

  I removed the sun hat I’d been wearing since the morning, pulled two pins from my hair, causing it to fall down my back. My head felt cool again, and I knew John liked to see my hair come down. He sat up straighter. I thought of M.

  “I think he would do anything you asked him to do, and I believe he could use something to do. Something important.”

  “I’ll consider it.”

  I walked out of the room. “Consider joining your wife, also.”

  I heard him scraping to his feet and coming after me. “Already considered.”

  A week later I became ill.

  CHAPTER 20

  Eli Griffin

  Rintrah came by the factory a week after our meeting in his jungle paradise.

  “How’s the ice?”

  “Still cold.”

  “Right.”

  He climbed up on Hood’s seat—I had come to think of it that way—and pulled out a pipe.

  “Ain’t supposed to light up in here. Chemicals.”

  “Well, can I chew on it at least? Or has Monsieur Rouart banned that too?”

  “No, I think you can chew on it.”

  “Thank you.”

  He worried the pipe from one side of his mouth to the other, staring at the files of icy pipes, white ghosts receding into the depths of the building.

  “I loved her, you know.”

  When a man says that to you, you know to keep your wise mouth shut.

  Rintrah said he had loved two beings in all his life. The first was the colored man Paschal, who I only know of because I’ve read about him here in these pages. He was the man who ended up in the attic under his care. They were brothers, or at least R
intrah considered them such. They were not brothers, no one knew where either of them had come from. They had been babies on a doorstep. They had lived in the orphanage together, tended by colored sisters, growing up side by side. Life afterward had knocked Rintrah up one side and down the other, but still he felt protective of the man, his brother. The man Paschal.

  The second love was for Anna Marie Hennen, and in that he was not entirely crazy. It was not crazy, once, to have thought that Anna Marie Hennen might love a dwarf. She was that sort of woman, he said. But instead, she had married a crippled general. “I hated him. I don’t no more, but I hated him. And I hated that she’d prefer a gimp to me, a killer to her loyal and loving Rintrah. When that wedding went off, I reckoned I was going to have to fend for myself. That was the beginning of my career, if you can call it that. But I didn’t stay mad and hateful. I came to like Hood well enough, and even to respect him. But I couldn’t never see the two of them together, it just ripped me up.”

  He went silent for a while. “And now it’s all falling apart,” he said, after a long time. “We’re all falling apart. I’m the only one left.”

  I knew nearly nothing about Rintrah, and so I didn’t know what he meant. His face cracked, his mouth slid into a wide slit, the mouth of a man trying not to cry. His light blue eyes welled up. He spit fiercely onto the ground in front of him and recovered himself a little. We sat there for two more hours. I went and got Rintrah a coat from Mr. Rouart’s office, and when Mr. Rouart came to fetch it and suggested that Rintrah leave, Rintrah swore at him and Mr. Rouart walked back to his office. He was angry but he left us alone.

  When I was done, Rintrah had his head cocked back on his neck much like Hood liked to do. He was staring unblinking at the ceiling.

  “So. Sebastien Lemerle.” His voice was low and dead.

  “Yes. I should start looking for him real soon, I think.”

  Rintrah jumped up and began to pace. He grabbed his hair in his big fists and pulled at it, twisted it. Something between a groan and a growl escaped from the back of his throat.

  “And then we kill him.”

  “That’s not the plan.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Well, of course we will seek his considered judgment on the literary and spiritual merits of the manuscript. And after that we will kill him. You keep your word, and I finish my own business. Right neat and tidy, I say.”

  “Why would I go and do that? I don’t want any part of no killing, not anymore.”

  He stopped, goggle-eyed, like I had just admitted I thought the world was flat and that I intended to jump off the edge on my invisible horse.

  “You would do this because this man”—he spit again—“this man killed Paschal, and without Paschal there would have been no priest to save you from the Calaboose, and no Rintrah to take care of you and get you a job and keep your ass from getting into trouble. This city would have killed you long ago without me. You’ll do it because you owe me. And if Hood was at all honest in that damned book about what Sebastien was to him, you’ll know that you ought to do it for Hood too.”

  I was fairly certain Hood had not meant for me to kill this Sebastien Lemerle. I stood up, towering over the little man. I was getting tired of being ordered around, and I was about to tell him this, though I knew it would earn me a certain beating by one of his black-bearded associates. But then I thought, What else do I have to do? I worked in a factory slicing ice. Chasing a villain was bound to be more fun. If avenging the death of this Paschal would relieve some burden, either Rintrah’s or Hood’s, maybe I was willing. There was something I didn’t understand though.

  “Why now? Why didn’t you go kill him before, if it was so important?”

  Rintrah had already begun walking for the door, preoccupied and mumbling to himself. He stopped.

  “Because John Hood told us Sebastien the Crow was dead. He said he killed him himself.” He remembered the coat I’d given him, took it off, folded it neatly, and placed it on his chair. “It’s a puzzle,” he finally said. “The truth is, I’m not sure I trust any of you sumbitches.”

  And with that, Rintrah put his old black bowler back on his head and walked into the sunshine.

  The job of finding Sebastien Lemerle, the hard job, I reckoned, fell to me. I objected since, hell, that had been the thing I wanted Rintrah to help me on. If he, the master of the underworld, couldn’t find him, how could I?

  “Well, of course I could find out where he’s at, now that I know he alive,” Rintrah said one day while loading up his fruit, on his way out to survey his domain. “But if I were to make the inquiries, or one of my known associates, word would get back to the Crow and he’d flee. Escape. Run terrified, soiling his britches. And we can’t have that, see? We need to keep him right where he’s at, wherever the hell that is, probably in a pirogue swamped in some fucking lost bayou. If he thinks Rintrah King is after him, there is no chance he will stay put. Hell, he might kill his ownself in self-defense.”

  He tossed me an artichoke he’d got off one of the arab boats, and I cursed him when it sunk its teeth into my palm. He laughed. I thought he might be overestimating his reputation, but I kept quiet.

  “You, on the other hand,” he continued, showing me how to rip off the flesh of the artichoke and suck it good through my teeth, “you are not one of my known associates. Instead you are an unknown young buck, obviously a country boy and probably an idjit, a God-eater who willingly goes to see nuns to take instruction, a callow, fearful, and no doubt harmless git that no one will bother warning Lemerle about. Hell, you might be awanting to sell him some ice subscriptions for all anyone knows. No, you’re perfect for the job. Now get to it.”

  He took the artichoke from me just as I was getting the better of the infernal fruit. He pointed to the door.

  * * *

  Rintrah hauled me in regularly, dragged behind two big men who never spoke but only grunted in some language the two of them understood but that sounded like what cave paintings might sound like. Where’s Sebastien? And each time I had to say, I don’t know.

  And I didn’t know. It hadn’t been hard to find his last house, just outside the Quarter in that negro section they called Treme, on a street named Marais. He’d had several houses during the last ten years, I found out from files at the Cabildo, what they called town hall down here. Always got to be different, these people. I found out each of the houses was smaller than the last, and each street a little more ragged than the last. Finally, when I found the Treme cottage, I watched the entrance from the porch of an abandoned house across the street, rocking in an old gray chair as if I belonged. No one came out, no movement, and no lights. After a couple hours, I crossed the street.

  The door was unlocked and I walked in, closing the door behind me. The place was an old cottage with four rooms, each opening onto the other. It was rustic, no doubt about that. The air was stale, trapped between the rough-hewn cypress planks in the floor and the dark overhead beams. But in between, on well-kept whitewashed plaster, hung some landscapes in oil and half a dozen silhouettes of a rat-faced family. That’s his, I’m sure. On an unfinished cedar side table lay a fine lace cloth, and on that a slightly tarnished silver snuffbox. Other than those objects, there was nothing else in the house: no beds, no linens, no pots in the kitchen, no food. He had once had money, that was clear, but here he’d been poor. And now he was gone.

  The man at the Cabildo, ink splotted below his eyes like blue freckles, said he had no idea where Sebastien Lemerle had gone, it wasn’t his job to keep track of every person, just every property. There had been no sale, Sebastien Lemerle still owned the little cottage in Treme. If there was a sale, he’d let me know, he said. I’m sure you will, I said.

  I was quite sick of arguing with Rintrah, who I had once counted as a friend. Now he was the man muscling me to do his work for him. If I was going to go back to my quiet job at the factory, I was going to need to find this Sebastien maniac and also figure out what the hell to do with this b
ook Hood had given me. I began to sit around the old Creole cafés and saloons, hoping for someone to mention Sebastien’s name, but it never happened. I asked bartenders if they knew him, and if they did they wouldn’t say, but they most always kicked me out right about then.

  There wasn’t more to do but keep asking around, so I did. And though I had no success flushing out Lemerle, I had better luck with a separate set of inquiries I began to make secret, under the nose of my all-knowing partner.

  I had by then read both manuscripts straight through maybe a half-dozen times, and with each reading any hope I had that the two sets of writings would work together to explain all the mysteries, well, that hope disappeared. They didn’t fit with each other, they didn’t complete each other. Whether this was true of their marriage I can’t ever know, since I wasn’t there to observe every little moment between them, every touching, every glance. They may have fit like a puzzle in life, but the written record was missing a whole lot of pieces, words, thoughts, explanations.

  The only mystery that really still mattered, though, because a man’s life would likely soon be taken because of it, was the mystery of Paschal. He hung over everything that had happened and would happen, as if he were secretly conducting things even now, in death.

  I read about him, and I notice things. He is absent for a very long time, and then he suddenly appears: at an orphanage, in a swamp, at a ball, in an attic. Everyone who knew him professes their eternal love for him and a certain marveled gratitude for his friendship, as if he were not entirely of this world and they were all better for it. Father Mike, Anna Marie, Rintrah. They talked about Paschal as if he had changed their lives, as if they were lost without him. Even Hood himself, who knew Paschal only as another nigger off to get lynched and then as the breathing corpse in the attic, even Hood swore up and down his life was changed at the lifeless feet of Paschal of the Attic.

  And yet. And yet.

  And yet where was everyone? Why was Paschal at the ball alone? Even with the Hoods at the ball, even at Anna Marie’s invitation, he was alone. Unapproachable, untouchable. Where is he during the courtship of the Hoods, and during the ten years since? Where are Rintrah’s stories of drinking and gambling with Paschal, of going to the club to hear Paschal on the piano ragging away? I had never heard him tell any such story about Paschal, or any story at all about the man that wasn’t in fact a story of the child Paschal. Rintrah would tell stories in great detail about a steak he’d had at Arnaud’s, or a madam he’d beat at chess in 1867, but never a story about Paschal the man, his friend. Father Mike had never said a word about him, either, except to say that he’d been the most beautiful dancer he’d ever seen, and that it was Paschal who really should have been the priest, that he would have brought far more souls into the Church than the great belligerent bear Father Mike had become, suitable only for lifting things and long hours at the altar rail praying for forgiveness. Paschal had grace, Father Mike used to say.