A Separate Country

by Robert Hicks

“And since there was ever only one subject any member of the Hood family ever wanted to talk to me about, I’m going to guess that you’re here to discuss Paschal Girard. Poor Paschal.”

  I remained silent. What was I to say to that? She should have been a police officer.

  “Come, come,” she said. “I am in a good mood, and I have a feeling that your interest in Paschal is, I don’t know, purer than Anna Marie’s. Anna Marie was a good woman, a good Catholic, but an imperfect friend. She knew it, and so her questions about Paschal were always weighted with guilt and sadness and suffering. You have some other purpose, you did not know the man. So out with it.”

  So I told her. That is, I told her only that Hood had told me a strange story about one of his wife’s friends, someone he had also known, and that he had always wondered what had become of the man who killed him. I told her that, on his deathbed, I promised I would look into the matter. That’s all I told her. She looked at me skeptically, tested her tea with her little finger, and then gulped half of it down.

  “So what have you found out, detective?”

  This time I didn’t lie, and I told her about what I had seen and heard in Treme the day before. I told her everything and then sat back, waiting for her to put the pieces together. She frowned.

  “Do you have a question?”

  “Is it all true? The man said to come find you, to ask you about it, so I reckon you know whether he was telling the truth or not.”

  “Of course he is telling the truth. But that is not your question, is it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Ask the real question.”

  I had put this question to myself a hundred times since the night before, testing out different ways of phrasing it, and yet I had nearly forgotten it when it came time to ask. Nearly forgotten, but still remembered.

  “Was Paschal the lover of Sebastien Lemerle’s wife?”

  “Not his wife. Sebastien Lemerle still believes in plaçage. She is, what, his mistress? Concubine? Though, I will say, my understanding is that he loves her fiercely and has no interest in any other woman.”

  “And Paschal?”

  “Paschal was nearly irresistible. He was very handsome.”

  “So it’s true.”

  “Do you think that I peek into the bedrooms of others? I do not know that it’s true. But I do know that Sebastien Lemerle thought it was true. And perhaps that’s all that mattered.”

  She finished her tea, which I took to be a sign. She thumped her thumb on her missal, which was embossed with a fine, thin gold cross.

  “I do not believe your story. I do not believe that a young man goes chasing after other men’s ghosts only because he heard of them on a deathbed. You know more than you say. That is your right. But I will say no more about this now. I believe, I’m not sure why, that your heart is pure in this, if in little else. You do not trust people, perhaps with good reason, but your mistrust makes you small. Too small, Mr. Griffin, to judge another man’s heart. We have all done terrible things, and you do not possess the wisdom to decide which of us deserves your punishment. Do not try to take that from God, the punishment is His. Do not become one to be punished.”

  I stood and began to move toward the door.

  “I understand you carved that rosary yourself.”

  “Sister Anne told you, I reckon?”

  “Yes. And she told me where you carved it. Out at Rintrah’s fish camps, no? Of course I knew of it! What happened out there, Eli, was a blessing, a grace before God that will be remembered. Don’t ever forget that. Let me see that rosary.”

  I hesitated, thinking she would count the beads and laugh at me. Then she snapped her fingers and opened her palm, and I figured I better drop them in. She closed her other hand over them and mouthed a prayer over them. I couldn’t understand the words, but she squeezed her eyes tight, and the color came up in her face. Then she relaxed and handed them back over to me.

  “Don’t lose those.”

  “Thank you, Sister.”

  Outside it had begun to rain. I held on to the rosary in my pocket and ran for home. The streets ran dark with the water, the cypress gutters roared with the rising water. Soon it was over the banquette and over my shoes. I stopped running and trudged on, shoulders hunched. I watched the men on the wharf covering their open crates with oilcloth. I was tempted to sneak under those cloths, into the crates, and let myself be shipped off someplace else, I didn’t care where. The task I’d shouldered seemed too heavy now, and it was dirty too. I wanted Rintrah to leave me alone, and I wanted Hood to leave me alone. Anna Marie too. They were all on me, pounding at my head with their arguments and pleadings and grievances. I was becoming tired of them, and yet I was still obliged to carry on, at least to do something with Hood’s book. Sister was right, the rest of it was beyond my understanding.

  When I got to Levi’s factory, I went around back and climbed the outside stairs to my front door. Next to the door sat M.’s tiny lace-ups with the square heels, newly polished. Anger got up in my throat. No one would leave me alone, it seemed. I pushed in.

  “I ain’t got no money, if that’s what you’re wanting,” I shouted, kicking off my boots. I didn’t hear anything, so I looked up.

  M. sat at my table under the window, her hair up in a loose knot that she kept twisting while bent over the papers on the table. Papers neatly stacked, each page laid gently down upon the next as she made her way through. There was Hood’s manuscript, tied up in one of her bow knots, and also Anna Marie’s ledgers, also tied up in a bow. The papers she flipped through now, almost lovingly, were the extra pieces of ledger paper filled with my own scrawl. I stood in the entryway, listening to the water drip to the floor, wondering what I should do. She looked up at me, pleased with herself, and something else. Pleased with me.

  “I told you I could read,” she said. Her hair glowed golden red in the lamplight, and she’d gathered her mouth up in the kindest smile I think I’d ever seen up to that very moment. I should have tossed her out, cuffed her around, exacted her silence about the manuscripts with threats. Instead I just watched her, saw how she had folded her legs up under and primly drawn her skirt down over her knees. She was wearing a modest dress for once, plain cotton, night-blue. She rested her head in one hand and stared right back at me.

  “What I didn’t know,” she continued, “was that you could write stories.”

  I went over and sat down at the seat across from her. I turned up the lamp so I could see her better. I didn’t say anything still, just counted the perfect little freckles under her eyes and across her nose. What the hell was happening to me?

  “You read it all, then?” I said.

  “Yes. I came looking for money and found this.”

  “You came to rob me?”

  “Borrow, more like. And anyway, I found this and I couldn’t stop reading it.”

  “I’d have liked it better if you’d robbed me.”

  “Oh, I found the money in that arm of yours, but I didn’t take none.”

  “Why?”

  At this she breathed deep. She twisted her hair, rearranged her legs. She looked at me with sad eyes.

  “I’d already begun to read these papers, and after that I didn’t want your money. Not no more.”

  The clouds outside piled up and bruised, lightning struck out by the lake, the lamp ran down on its oil, my little Irish bedmate talked low and sweet, she reached out for my hand, and we let ourselves sit silently and let the sadness wrap us up. It was the sadness of change, I reckon. We weren’t no longer who we were, pervert and whore, but now something else. A moment of silent sadness was called for, I reckon.

  In the morning she stayed and she never left.

  Out of the tangle of sheets and rambling twists of red hair came a voice.

  “You need help, you know.”

  I had got out of bed early, as usual. Washed my face, combed my hair, put on my white shirt and blue pants and black boots, which I polished. I was sitting
at the table ignoring the three neat piles of paper lined up in front of me. I stared out the window across the tin roofs of the warehouses, all of them streaked in delicate lines of rust. I saw the first slips of smoke took up into the air above the molasses sheds, first black and then a pure white. The wharfs began to wake up, first one shout, then a hundred. Everyone awake.

  “I got help.”

  “Rintrah ain’t your help. Rintrah is your boss, boyo.”

  The night before, before we’d collapsed into the bed, fully clothed for the first time that I can recall, I had told her what would be soon written down on my own scraps of paper: the deal with Rintrah, the discovery of Paschal’s life in Treme, Sister Mary Thérèse. M. seemed not at all shocked to hear that this man, Paschal, so worshipped by the others, by a general who attended him in his attic as if he were attending at the mouth of the cave, that this man might have had his own sins to confess.

  “He was just a man,” she’d said. “And I don’t mean just a nigger, either. Just a man. Maybe they fell in love, that would be sweet, right?”

  “Maybe they didn’t do nothing.” I glared at the man firing up the cotton press down on the wharf, but he didn’t notice. I wanted to protect the memory of Paschal for reasons I didn’t understand. I had become attached to the man though I had never known him. I reckon it wasn’t Paschal I was so concerned with, but those piles of paper in front of me. I didn’t want them to be the records of fools, of the deceived.

  M. lifted herself from the bed as if she were carrying five others on her back. Groan, curse, creak. But she was thin as a whip, and I watched the muscles flex in her back, admired the hard curve of her waist. Her hair rolled down and brushed across her hip like curtains. I had never watched her so closely. When her feet touched the cold boards, she sprang up and over to a bag I’d not seen in the corner, and soon she was back in the bed with a comb pulling through her hair. She’d never brought a comb before, never brought anything but herself and her breasts and her ass before. Where did that bag come from? And because she’s Irish, she reads minds.

  “I always bring a bag, you know, so don’t look at me like that.”

  “Never brought a bag.”

  “Every time. You just don’t never see it.”

  I stared down at the piles of paper. Was I going to have to put M. in it now? What did she mean, I needed help?

  “Rintrah and I are partners in this, M.”

  “So, what if you told him to go fuck himself, mmm? He gone say, Oh, you right, Eli, I shall! And sorry for the intrusion?” She snorted and started to giggle. I tried not to smile.

  “We want the same thing, M., and if he thinks he got to threaten me and insult me to get it done, I don’t mind much. It gone all be all right in the end, and I can’t do this alone.”

  “Hmmpf. Now I’m just a stupid streetwalking tater eater, that’s true, but I read them papers right there and I don’t see where you come to find that you and the dwarf got the same interests. Seems the dwarf wants the man Sebastien’s head served up to him, and he gone use you to do it. You gone to lead that man to his death? That’s what you in it fer?”

  I put my hand down flat on Hood’s manuscript, like I’d get the answer up through the pads of my fingers and into my blood. No use.

  “No.”

  She shook out her hair and wrenched it up in a knot on her head quick, nearly too quick for me to see how the hell she did it. She frowned and stepped out of the bed and into one of my shirts and a pair of my pants. She looked as if she’d been swallowed up in my clothes. She glared, and then let her eyes soften a little, like she’d temporarily forgotten that the world had changed overnight. She came around and sat at the edge of the bed nearest me, her hands soft and still in her lap.

  “No, that’s right, I reckon. You made a promise to a dying man, and I reckon that you don’t got no business with anything else but seeing that you keep that promise.”

  “When did you start thinking you could give out orders to me?”

  “I’m just saying what already writ down on those papers. You made that promise, not me.”

  I liked her ordering me around. She was prettier than Rintrah, looked better in pants. She went on.

  “And from what I can tell, whatever or whoever this Paschal was, he ain’t no concern of yours. You’re just stickin’ your nose in.”

  “You saying you ain’t curious?”

  “I’m curious as you, but we ain’t talking about me.”

  “All right.”

  “And, I reckon I should say, you don’t got no cause to be turning that man into Rintrah, doing Rintrah’s dirt for him. Hood told you to bring that book to the man, and that you should do. That was your promise. If you want to get him killed, too, that’s got nothing to do with Hood or your promise. That’s just you thinking you know the truth about what happened, that you can sit like a judge on the man. Can you?”

  You do not possess the wisdom to decide which of us deserves your punishment, Sister had said. “You been over to church, M.?”

  “Every day.”

  “I can tell.”

  “Don’t mean I’m not ready to sin,” she said, moving her knees to touch mine.

  She was right, of course. The promise I’d made had nothing to do with Paschal Girard. The question of what to do about Sebastien had become more complicated. I didn’t know what to think about him, nor what I would do about giving him over to Rintrah, and so I decided to put that part of my promise to Hood aside for a bit. I still had that other book to go get my hands on, the war book, at the moment in the possession of one of the city’s leading citizens, General P. G. T. Beauregard. I reckoned it might be smart to start there, him being a friend of Hood’s and an important man. I thought General Beauregard might have some idea what I was supposed to do with this other thing, the secret memoir. I left M. snoring away happily in the thin afternoon light. She looked happy, anyway.

  Beauregard had several houses, including one on Chartres all the way down the street from Rintrah’s house, near the edge of the Quarter. I tried that one first. I had been impressed by Rintrah’s house, but holy damn. Two staircases curved up from either side of the entrance outside, like arms reaching out to grab you in. Four thick round pillars out front, scrolls at the top, and a front door closed in at the top and sides by windows cut through with circles and rectangles, strange patterns with meanings I didn’t understand. The place looked like the mausoleum of a prince, or a government office.

  A colored man in straight black pants and a white servant’s coat answered the door. He was shorter than me, but near as thick as the doorway. He looked up at me with his eyes half closed, as if I’d woken him and he reckoned he didn’t have to wake up entirely because he’d be back to sleep soon enough having tossed me out.

  “Yes?”

  “I am here to see General Beauregard. Is he at home today?” I looked past his shoulder. He moved slick, nearly unnoticeable, and blocked my view.

  “These are not his at-home hours, sir.”

  One of the things I’d learned about New Orleans was that one could be at home, which meant folks could come see you, and that meant you could most of the time be at home without being at home.

  “But is he here?”

  “What is this regarding?”

  “I am here on business for General John Bell Hood.”

  “And so?”

  “And so how about you go tell him that? And quit staring at me like I just shit on your shoes.” I had also learned that the formalities could get you all tied up in knots if you didn’t sometimes break on through and throw it down, man-to-man. I puffed my chest out and he narrowed his eyes even more, this time a squint meant to see right into me. Then he stepped back and had me sit on a long black bench against the wall of the center hall while he went and mumbled something in a room off to the right, down the end of the hallway. And after a minute, here came General Beauregard, no servant to be seen.

  He was tall, twiggy but strong-looking,
his beard still black and clipped neat, his hair still slicked back. He didn’t say anything to me, only gestured down toward a room on the left, where the man in white was busily building a fire, laying each log gently as if afraid to make any noise.

  Portraits of himself and other generals lined the dark walls. Battle flags framed in gilt rested on small stands throughout. On his desk stood a small Confederate battle flag and a bust of General Lee. Behind him tall bookshelves held hundreds of books on the war, other wars, military strategy, and history.

  This is the library of a general, I thought, remembering Hood’s strange, airy, and cluttered room where he kept his desk.

  “I don’t have much time, boy, but I understand you’re a friend of General Hood’s, and so I have a few minutes.”

  He sat straight in the chair behind him, crossed his legs, and occasionally sipped something hot from a saucer he kept filling from his cup. I’d never seen that.

  “While I’m thinking about Hood, have you been to see him recently? I have questions about his war memoirs.”

  “Well, that’s what I came to talk to you about.”

  He didn’t seem to hear me.

  “They are, of course, tendentious and coarse, as Hood is himself, and they will do little to improve his reputation, but I am a man of my word and I will cause them to be published if he dies. Why he thinks he’s going to die is a mystery to me, though. There is very little fever this year, though I understand his wife has died. Mary Anne, correct? He should go out to the country and take his children, breathe the fresh air. In fact, you’re lucky to catch me here. Only here for some business this morning, and then it’s off to the country myself.”

  He turned in his chair and stared out the window, in his own thoughts. One of his hairs sprang loose and curled down the side of his head. He let it stay, unaware.

  “Sir.”

  “Yes.”

  “He did die. A week ago. He and his daughter Lydia. I’m sorry to be bringing that news.”

  I am usually good at reading a man’s face, but this face moved too quickly for me. Eyebrows lifted and sank, corners of the mouth jumped and sagged, his forehead was like waves on a lake, chopped up and rough and then suddenly calm. A whole story passed by right there, and I didn’t get the first word out of it until he’d finally gathered himself and his face froze, sad but not sad enough as far as I was concerned.