A Separate Country

by Robert Hicks

  Paschal was also a negro, the whitest of negroes but still a negro. They rarely mentioned that, but I reckoned it was the place to start.

  I went back down to Treme, looking for anyone who might have known Paschal recently. In the dirt streets of the neighborhood, ditched but unguttered, colored women walked home with baskets of food and wearing the tignon on their heads, indigo and yellow and green and red and every other color I had no words to describe. Carts passed by, the horses old and swaybacked but the carts painted and greased and running silent below their cargoes of fabrics and lumber and sugarcane. The cottages here were small, but built on thick posts and beams and painted as if it were always Carnival. There was an apothecary’s shop, a butcher, a bank. Churches everywhere, small huts and steepled palaces, Catholics and Baptists and Methodists all squeezed in. I saw a man selling fish on Marais Street. He’d iced the redfish and bull cats down, and I nearly told him I’d made that ice but thought better of it, afraid he’d think me crazed and have me run out of the neighborhood. I meandered on, past Lemerle’s old house, until I’d gone across the street and around a corner, where I surprised a gang of cats that scattered grudgingly and with hate in their eyes. Down two houses an old man on his porch sat watching me and smiling.

  “Lost.” It sounded like a question.

  “Oh, nah, just looking round a bit,” I said.

  His face cracked open like a rock split in the heat, a thousand tiny cracks that slipped together as one big grin.

  “No, believe me, you lost. But I’ll hep you find your way home again. You don’t want no trouble, now, I’m sure.”

  “No.”

  He was very tall, taller than me, and so dark his airy gray hair seemed lit from inside. His eyes smiled, wrinkled permanently that way, and he wore denim overalls faded to nearly the color of the sky, white at the knees. He waved me up and onto a stool beside him. He had been peeling shrimps from a pail containing a little more of my ice, no doubt bought over on Marais Street at the fish cart.

  “Only got shrimps for me and the wife, sorry to say.”

  “I ain’t hungry, thank you.”

  “At all?”

  “No.”

  “So, you saying that if I bulled them shrimps up right now, you ain’t gone to eat one?”

  “Not if there was only enough for you and your wife.”

  “Didn’t say that. Said they were for me and the wife, meaning not for wandering white men lost on their way to the brothel. But now that I see you up close rycheer, I say you ain’t one of them. You just lost, any count.”

  We were quiet for a moment, only the sound of the shells snicking into his trash bucket. I looked in and a few dozen heads stared back at me attached to white shells, ghosts of their former hosts.

  “I’d give you a shrimp, it come to that.”

  “And I weren’t lying when I said I weren’t hungry.”

  “All right.”

  He went silent again, but he looked straight at me, expecting something. His eyes had yellowed. I decided to start with this old man.

  “Are you from here?” Sliding into the questions, make it sound like just talk.

  “Do you mean, am I a Louisiana nigger? A New Orleans nigger? No, I ain’t. I am a Mississippi country negro and until the war I had me a nice little place near Vicksburg, cotton, hogs, and vegetables. I was a free negro like my daddy, case you wondering. Well, Vicksburg weren’t no place for a negro, free or no, come the war, so we come on down to hide round here, with all the rest of the free negroes, except they all French and they polish their nails. The jens culyoor, it’s French, you look it up. I build houses now, and the children, they had been good hardworking and churching country negroes, but now they Creoles, and they wear funny hats and pray up there with the Catholics. No, say, I am not from here.”

  “I see, well…”

  “But I got eyes, I see good. What you want to know?”

  He had stopped peeling shrimp. He wanted to talk, I could tell, he wanted to show me how much he knew, how nothing got by him. That’s how folks get around strangers sometimes, they want to let you know this here’s their territory, you just the smallest speck of it. I could be that speck.

  “Did you ever know a man named Paschal Girard?”

  “Colored?”

  Could I be that lucky? I prayed I was.

  “Yes, yes!”

  “No. Not a white one either. Don’t know any Girards, truth is.”

  I rubbed my eyes, got some dirt in them, rubbed them some more, and finally had to wipe the tears from my face. The old man handed me his handkerchief, but I waved him away. This was hard work, no doubt.

  “He was, well, hmmm, maybe not as black as you?”

  Shrimp peeled, snick. Head never moved from the job.

  “You mean he looked white?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s a thousand niggers right here in this neighborhood, don’t know how many more in other places. It don’t describe much is what I’m saying.”

  “Played the piano.”

  “That makes it, reckon, two hundred.”

  “Long fingers.”

  “You kidding?”

  I realized then that not only did I know no stories of Paschal since the war, I didn’t have the first idea how to describe him in any way that might have added up to a whole fella. All I had were his skin, his music, his fingers, and something about grace. And then, maybe, one other thing.

  “Might have been friends with a priest and a dwarf.”

  He stopped peeling and looked up at the rafters of his porch. Then he continued peeling.

  “Now that there, that do narrow it down considerable.”

  Snick, snick, snick. He peeled faster now, fingers moving quick but never more than they had to move. He became more efficient as he got more riled up. He looked out at the street and I looked too. Men carrying burlap sacks over their shoulders walked slowly down toward their houses, home for the day from whatever it was they worked at. Most of them were covered in cotton, though some had got tar on their boots. Every few houses one turned up and onto the porch, took off his boots, tossed his bag inside, and set down on whatever chair, stool, or stump he had handy. Most of them lit themselves a smoke, a few drank out of flasks buried deep in the pockets of their coveralls. And all of them, every last one, were watching us. Not us so much, but me. They could have picked me out five blocks away, I shone in the sun like a beacon. I had to ignore them, press on.

  “You knew him then.”

  He ran out of shrimp and began to fiddle with the ice, to arrange the peeled shrimp in perfect circles.

  “If you know that much about the man, you know what happened to him. And that ain’t happening to this negro. Hell, I didn’t even know his name until you said it.”

  “He lived here. In Treme.”

  He shook his head no.

  “Had family down here. Cousin I heard. The man and his wife and daughter died a year ago, yellow jack. And now you got to go.”

  I couldn’t go. Not right then. He stood up, gathered his two pails, shrimp in one hand and shells in the other. A powerful old man, I wondered why he didn’t throw me out. But he paused before going inside, deliberate, like he might could answer a couple more but make ’em quick and sly.

  “He was down here a lot, since you know so much about him.”

  “Yes.”

  “Where did his cousin live?”

  “On Marais.”

  My head began to pound hard, a hammer up in there. I had to sit back down to sort it out, but there was no time.

  “A man named Lemerle lived on that street,” I whispered into my hand, which I pretended to be rubbing over my beard. Not very sly, but the best I could do at the moment.

  He opened the door quick, as if to get out of the way of my words.

  “And now you got to go see Sister Mary Thérèse at the Holy Family Convent, she knows, I don’t know no more.”

  “What’s your name?”

  He
shut the door. Locked it. I walked out of there under the gaze of every single man on every single porch, all the way into the Quarter to Maspero’s, where I drank.

  Sister Mary Thérèse. Maybe I should have gone to her first, that’s what Anna Marie had done. But what could I do to gain an audience? Busting in and demanding information about Paschal had not worked real well for Anna Marie, so why would it work for me? I had to figure something else out. Some other reason, some way to slide on up in there, get in her good graces.

  In the front of Maspero’s, at a large circular table dotted with red candles, sat the last of the great Creole warriors, a half-dozen at least. Shouting vive! at this, and vive! at that, all the while looking like someone had pissed in their drinks. And too old to be up past sundown anyway. Their world had shrunk until it was only as big as that table, all the old wars were over and who cared what the hell relation of theirs had slept with Bienville? I stood at the back of the café, leaning against the bar as far as I could from the men, who now got up a toast to Napoleon. Their world shrank while mine was being split wide open, accelerating away from me. I was scared, I don’t mind admitting to it. I had knowledge I could not possibly share with anyone, least of all Rintrah. Rintrah would either think I was lying and have me strung up, or he’d think I might be telling the truth, in which case he’d have the old man tortured, and every other man he could find, until he’d confirmed the truth of it.

  Paschal and Lemerle had been very familiar with the same street and the same block of the same little neighborhood at the same time. Lemerle had seen Paschal, Paschal had seen Lemerle, they had talked, they were friends! Speculation, yes, but possible. And not a possibility anyone else knew or wanted to know. Except for, perhaps, this Sister Mary Thérèse.

  The bartender waddled over. His belly, encased in a crisp white shirt, would only allow him so close to the edge of the bar. He talked leaning back, as if facing a hurricane.

  “Whiskey again?”

  “Yessir. And maybe you can answer me a question right quick.”

  His eyes drooped, expecting some kind of idjit drunken wiseassedness.

  “When is the public Mass at Holy Family? It’s just up the street, right?”

  He smiled, relieved, I think.

  “I go every day! It’s quiet in there, people normally afraid of nuns, and so not so many bead rattlers making scenes of themselves. Just quiet on in there. It’s half past nine every morning.”

  Now I knew how to get in with Sister Mary Thérèse.

  “Thank you, brother.”

  “God bless you.”

  I thanked him again. Blessings, I needed a whole mess of them.

  * * *

  Two days later I rode through the woods and beneath the vines way down in Terrebonne Parish, south of the city, the last parish before the coast. I was on my way to either save Sebastien Lemerle or kill him, and I wasn’t sure which. I had a better mount now, a black pony that danced through the brush like a deer.

  It began with Sister Mary Thérèse, of course. All roads led back to the mother superior, seemed like. Thanks to the bartender at Maspero’s, and my own brief education in the way of the Church, I had figured my way in.

  The morning after I had learned of Paschal’s life down on Marais Street in Treme, I was in the third pew of the chapel at Holy Family, the first two reserved for the sisters. I arrived early and kneeled and prayed the creed, and a prayer of redemption, and began to pray the rosary with some beads I’d carved while up in the fish camps the year before. I had meant to give them to M., but she had her own and, as she pointed out, I’d left out two Our Fathers, one Glory Be, and one Hail Mary. I remember getting hot and telling her it didn’t matter, dammit, and she said that it weren’t the beads themselves that mattered, it was the fact that I’d forgotten.

  Now I prayed over them hoping that I would be noticed, even if the rosary itself was a mess. I needed those nuns to notice me, especially old Sister Mary Thérèse, and I knew that the sight of a man praying the rosary would be unusual enough to grab their attention. Rosaries were for women, at least that was my limited understanding of the matter. And so I prayed hard over them, my lips moving fast, my eyes squeezed tight. After each Glory Be I paused and looked up at the window Anna Marie had described, the Resurrection window. Christ seemed at peace as He ascended, but His poor mother looked as if she might shatter from grief. For a moment I thought that maybe, had she her druthers, she would have yanked Him back to earth to be a boy again. That was the expression on her face.

  Then I bent over the beads again and worked them until my fingers were numb. I found myself forgetting why I had come, the plan. I was just praying, it was like I was hypnotized and kept thinking about that mother and son, parting on earth. I didn’t notice the nuns when they filed in, and it was only when the priest began that I got up and took my seat.

  Back to the plan, I thought. I knew that it was beyond the power of a nun, not in her makeup, to ignore a strange penitent who prayed so fervently with them. And more importantly, I knew that if that penitent went to the altar rail for Communion, but crossed his arms so that he would be given only a blessing and not the Eucharist, no nun (and, I hoped, no mother superior) would be able to keep from speaking to someone so obviously tortured in his soul. The priest might not notice, but the nuns would.

  And so it was that, after the service, while I was pretending to be lost in the corridor of the convent, Sister Mary Thérèse approached and said hello.

  “Hello,” I said. “Sister.”

  “You are new here, hmmm? It was a pleasure to have you today, but shouldn’t you be at Mass in your own parish?”

  I said I didn’t know, that I wasn’t from New Orleans. I hadn’t thought about this exactly, but of course the plan meant I had to lie to a nun. And now I had gone and done it. What kind of Catholic was I going to be? It wasn’t a good beginning.

  “Where are you from?”

  “Tennessee.”

  “Hmmm. Must be Nashville.”

  “Thereabouts.”

  “Have you met Father Donegal?”

  Oh hell, she was testing me. Maybe she’d noticed the beads that looked like they’d been carved by a blind Mohameddan. I took a stab at it.

  “Never met him, but I’m scared of priests.”

  She chuckled. “Hmmm. Well. With good reason sometimes, I’d say. I’m about to have some tea, would you like to join me? I take it in my office. It’s weak, but nice and warm.”

  Ha. It had taken Anna Marie weeks to break through to Sister Mary Thérèse, and here I was about to have tea with her. Why Anna Marie had never thought to come to Mass, I don’t know. Women don’t plan so well, I thought to myself. They go running off half-cocked. Got to be smooth, precise, wily. That was me.

  When we got to Sister’s office, she shut the door behind us and offered me a seat. Her desk was entirely clear except for her missal, and behind her was the unusual crucifix Anna Marie had described, Christ in agony.

  A novice came in immediately with a pot of tea and one cup. Sister sent her off for a second cup and then turned to me.

  “How are you enjoying your catechism lessons with Sister Anne?”

  What?

  She went on. “You do know, of course, that Sister Anne is a member of our order, and though she is out in the parishes, she attends Mass here once a week? It’s her way of staying in touch with her sisters.”

  No, I did not know that.

  “Too bad for you, Eli Griffin, that today is typically the day she comes. She is so very proud of you, I should say, Eli. She says you are a wonderful student, and she even confided in me this morning that you might, how did she put it, Have the calling. That means she thinks you might make a priest. Do you think you will be a priest, Eli Griffin?”

  I was saying to myself, The nuns won’t hurt me, the nuns won’t hurt me, and praying for time to speed up. “I doubt it, Sister.”

  “Me, too, though the calling is a mysterious thing. You might be
a religious yet, but first you should start by not lying to old nuns.”

  Here she smiled, took a cup from the novice who had just then arrived back in the room, and poured me a cup. She had me cold. I thought I should just leave, give up on this plan. But I stayed, and I think I stayed because I really felt guilty, and I thought I owed her an apology. I wanted her forgiveness. I wanted this nun to tell me that I was forgiven, and that I was not on my way straight to Hell.

  “I’m sorry, Sister. I wanted to speak to you, but I didn’t think you’d want to speak to me.”

  “Have they not heard of asking back where you’re from? Tennessee. Are you really from Tennessee?”

  “Long ago, when I was a boy.”

  “Praise His Name, the man isn’t entirely a liar.”

  She blew on her tea, both cheeks puffed out, and then put it aside.

  “You were a friend of General Hood’s. And therefore you probably knew Anna Marie, also, I’m guessing.”

  She must have had spies. Or she was magic. I was scared now.

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t look so frightened. Sister Anne told me you knew General Hood, and that you had attended Anna Marie’s funeral last month. You had asked her how to behave at a Catholic funeral, do you remember?”

  “Yes, now I do.”