by Robert Hicks
The big man and his companion had gone halfway through the crowd. The little one kept losing his footing, either jerked off balance or his feet slipping on the thousands of discarded tickets, cigarette papers, and newspapers. Beauregard stood impatiently, his arms crossed, one finger lazily tapping at his chin. I noticed the other general had moved from his place in the background and stood next to Beauregard. He looked out at the crowd, and drew my eye toward a clot of young men moving quickly through the crowd, pushing others aside with shouts, moving toward the prize winners. He sees it too! I thought, careful to stay on top of my chair, out of the roiling and flowing of the crowd. The generals whispered to each other. They waited. Hurry, I thought, but they would not. They watched.
The two winners had been surrounded by the crowd. The boy had gained his footing. I saw the two black hats bobbing in the middle like things caught in a river eddy, I saw a swirl of men shouting at them and pulling and grabbing at them. Briefly, I thought their backs looked familiar. Turn around, I thought, but they didn’t, and I reckoned I had seen men like them a thousand times. Something about the hats, but I’d forgotten what it was. I couldn’t have been more stupid, Lord forgive me.
I could see that it was the young boy who now had the ticket clenched tight in his fist. Two large and bearded men—did they all have beards?—kicked and punched and grabbed at the two, and meanwhile another man crawled through the legs of the onlookers and began to pry and bite at the boy’s clenched fist, the fist with the ticket.
The big man received two blows to the head by a man with a cane, and soon he was down on the ground, disappeared. He dragged the boy down with him, unwilling to let go of him. I heard a shout of pain. Soon more onlookers joined in, those passive and cowardly men I knew every mob required, men who, having held back out of fear, now would try to outdo each other. I began to feel sick, and leaned my head against the cool wall. The mob, I am tired of the mob. The mob caved in on the two black hats, swallowing them.
Finally the two generals decided to act, and for the first time Beauregard looked as if he had actually been a general and not a circus barker. The two men scanned the crowd and began shouting orders to the wings, where a few men with clubs had been standing out of sight. They began to point, ordering the hired thugs into the crowd, but they were too late.
The men with the clubs, on their errand from the generals, cut a row through the crowd by cracking the skull of anyone who dared stand in front of them. They enjoyed their work. I watched the lusty way they swung their clubs, and the almost tender way they kicked the unconscious aside. It was nothing personal. Never personal.
They clubbed the crowd aside and when they did they revealed the two men, slumped on the floor, blood pooling around them. They dragged the big man into the swallowing crowd, facedown, off and out a side door. The young man saw the glint of a blade in the man’s back. A trail of red followed him out, as did the boy, slumped between two guards, nodding his head up and down, trying to look up but having no strength. He must have said something to a man standing in front of him, because the man spit in his face. The guards, to their credit, cracked the spitter’s skull for him.
Perhaps the winners had seemed familiar to me because they had seemed so common, so unremarkable. So much like me.
Up on the stage, the lottery continued, no winner declared, no ticket claimed.
I hurried out, skirting the crowd huddled along the wall in the shadows. I imagined they reached out to me. I am imagining things now. I was confused. I turned left and left again and left one more time before I had oriented myself. Then I strode through the city, straight toward home.
So that’s what I thought I saw. Now I realize that what I had actually seen was the murder of a priest I knew.
CHAPTER 23
Anna Marie Hood
I cannot explain to you, Lydia, how it is that I know that I will die soon, but I’ve had that premonition and I am sure I am right. I have developed a head cold, a cough, and I feel cold though it is August. A hundred times I’ve felt this way in my lifetime. This time it is different. God has visited me, I have felt the Holy Spirit upon me, comforting me, preparing me, assuring me that you will be safe and happy. Light is brighter now, the things of our house have sharper edges. There is beauty in the dust and also in the clear sweep of glass that admits the view outside, where it is brilliant and green and blue and the feathers of the sparrows are each visible. They tremble and flit and fluff, and I know when each bird will take off and leave me the instant before it does. I have been blessed with the knowledge of my death, that is, with the sharp and insatiable eyes of a visitor who hears the embarkation whistle on the quay for the last time.
Anna Gertrude sleeps beside me, and the bassinet still flakes its paint. She is so fat! She breathes quietly, I have to listen closely for the whisper of air moving between those sweet, fat lips. She will not remember me, she will not remember our lying here in the last of the summer’s heat, exhausted still by the struggle to live, sleeping the afternoons away. She will not remember this time, when we were at peace. She will know me as a stone marker, a photograph, the slowly diminishing memories of her older sisters and brothers. Keep these diaries safe, Lydia, so that perhaps she might at least know one day what her mother thought about this life.
I want to keep this illness from your father, but I suppose I musn’t. I would like to die quietly, without the disruption of grieving and worrying and nursing and confessing. Quiet, simple, slip off. I do not want to say good-bye.
But he must be warned if I have the fever, there will be steps to take now. I wish you would come into the room, Lydia, right now, so that we could play checkers. Will you remember playing checkers with me? Remember that, it was fun. He must send you away. He must send you all away. I will be alone at the end, except for God, and He doesn’t make sweet sounds of glee running after His sisters in the hallway. It will be quiet.
Remember this year, remember this wonderful year we’ve had together. When we returned from the fish camps, healthy and poor and free, there was nothing for us to do but live. Nowhere to go, nothing to buy, no one to see.
I am giggling now, but there is no one here to see. What silliness this state of affairs would have seemed to me ten years ago. Then there was always someone to see, someone to call on, some place to sing and laugh and whisper about the million trivialities that concerned us, my cousins and my friends. We read the newspapers for our names, we imagined death to be the exclusive possession of the poor and the old. Who could ever die in a new crinoline from Paris, who could die who danced a reel? All of us could disappear, every one, but with that knowledge lies insanity. We live as immortals, even though we pray for our souls and listen for the sounds of the afterlife from the altar. I don’t know that I ever believed in my soul, not until lately.
We had spent all our money, of course. What little we had left. I’m afraid I am to blame for this, for shaming your father into this, but I have no regrets and I don’t believe he has any either. Most of you children are too young to notice your poverty, or to think of it that way. To you there are merely fewer adults around the house to tie you up in proper dresses and scrub your faces and make you play proper games. There are no servants anymore, that is. Perhaps the world is bigger and more interesting now! The whole house is yours to roam. The shrubs are unclipped and wild, yours to hide beneath. We make supper together, you children chop the potatoes and the greens with great enthusiasm. Why did I never let you help with supper before? Perhaps because I never helped with supper either.
Do you remember when we walked to the river and ate our cold fish and raced sticks in the water? Your father took his leg off and hopped around after you children calling you little Comanche? He fell and he rolled around and little John Junior helped him up, so serious and concerned and such a little boy! It was cold and we gathered in our blankets, which were moth-holed, but I believe only I noticed. Some of them were the blankets we’d used at the fish camps last summer.
But now I feel the corruption in my veins, my arms and my legs are heavy and drawn down to earth, and I do not want even a hundred more days. I am tired and happy. I was a girl like so many other girls, I was a young lady like my cousins and their friends and a hundred other young ladies, and then I was a wife to a general and a mother to eleven children, only that as far as I knew. And then I discovered that I was Anna Marie, and that I cared about the friend I had abandoned, Paschal, and that I mourned the dignity of the dead, and that I could be outraged, and that I could be courageous. Your father knows a kind of courage, a courage that exposes itself to sharp and flying things, that tests itself against the fear of violent death. But I have discovered courage in the abandonment of the past and in the embrace of a new life. I have walked away from a particular girl who also called herself Anna Marie, who would have lived and died ignorant of life’s bounty only because she had assumed it would always be bountiful, that she was infinite, and that those for whom it wasn’t bountiful lay accursed. I see no farther than the house now, perhaps the street, too, and within those bounds our lives are more complex and more interesting. I know the freckles on the back of your neck now, Lydia, when once I might not have known they were there at all. I know the rasp of John Junior’s breath when he is hiding behind the curtains, and I know that John is superstitious about snakes. The vessel of our lives is small now, but life has filled it. I have no other way to describe it.
I would do nothing different now. That’s not true. If I could wait to die until you were all grown, so that I could know what kind of men and women you will become, I would. I can only hope that in these pages you’ll find what your mother wanted for you, and that was to be loved.
This will be the last that I write, I am quickly running out of energy, and so I suppose I must explain some last things.
I believe that Father Mike is dead. I know that John thinks he ran away, that he ran away from his responsibilities and from the mission that had begun and could not be ended, the mission to the poor and benighted and woebegotten who would never share in the prosperity of the city and would be allowed to die as so much raw material to be chopped and burnt and discarded. With our impoverishment the mission had become tough, there were no more rich friends with money to give to Father Mike’s mission, and so he left, according to John. One day he was out there at St. Geneviève’s supervising the last of the stone carving, the next day he was meeting with Rintrah in the house on Chartres, pointedly excluding John from the discussions, and then a few days later he was gone.
John was mightily disappointed, more so than I understand. We had given away our money in the expectation that the work would continue, that it would change something. Truthfully, I suspect we thought it would change us, and that we could not live without it. I could understand his frustration, and I felt it myself. But he was enraged like someone jilted, and then he became despondent. He sat in the living room chairs and brooded, occasionally calling out to me as I passed through the room, on my way to save one of the children from the tangle of weeds and the creeping ticks.
“He retreated, he is a deserter.”
“That doesn’t sound like Father Mike.” I pretended to dust the mantel.
“He told me once, he told me.” John yanked at the strap on his leg, pulling it tight until the skin around his wound turned death white. “He told me he was there to remind me of my obligation to God, to Him. He saved me from myself. And now where is he? Has he forgotten?”
I finished with the mantel and rubbed John’s shoulder before heading out to the backyard, where you, Lydia, were rolling in the mud like a pig.
I thought Father Mike was dead even then, but I would never say anything to John about it. There was an absence and I could feel it, as if the city was lighter, less consequential, a thing beginning to float away unmoored. Sometimes I dreamt of Michel’s heartbeat and I could hear it stop. I don’t know when it happened, but I was sure it had happened. Michel had died. He could not have fled. John did not know my old friend quite as well as I did. There was nothing in Michel that would have allowed him to quit a fight. He was much like John in this regard.
Soon your father overcame his anger, forgot his disappointment. He took it out on Rintrah and refused to speak with him. There was no more sick ward for John to attend, no more dying people to depend on him. Rintrah’s house became an empty shell of what it had been, full of life even if that life was always approaching its end. It had been light and clean, a good place to die among people who cared. Rintrah drew the curtains, kept only a few of his old henchmen around him, lived in the dark. He abandoned the fish camps and let his business deteriorate until all he had were a few captains on the wharf willing to do business with him, to let him move their goods through the underground. He appeared on our doorstep three times since the summer. I spoke with him the first time on our front porch. His words were mad, his eyes shined. He had something to tell John that he could not tell me, and I said that he could not possibly have any secrets from me who had known him since he was a boy, and he said that there were too many such secrets and that he was ashamed.
“Then speak to me,” I said. We sat on hard wood stools that had been painted by mildew at their feet.
“It is man’s business,” he said.
“Pah.”
“There is such a thing, Anna Marie.”
“Vanity it is, in my experience. Men’s business.”
He rolled his hat in his thick hands. It was felt, and black, and had the shape of a pie left out in the rain.
“Do you miss it? The old times? We are the only two left.”
“There are plenty left, Rintrah. Look around. Do you hear the children? There are ten now.”
“Soon to be eleven,” he said, smiling sadly.
“Yes. And then there’s John.”
“They are not mine. I do not belong to them, and they do not belong to me. It is different for me, Anna Marie. You did not answer the question, but I will. Yes, I miss those times, and I miss who we were.”
Then, at that moment, I knew why I could be happy while the house around me moldered and gathered dust. The life in the house did not molder and gather dust, it grew. I could be happy because I did not miss who I had been. I did not miss the balls and the dresses and the amusements, but most of all I did not miss the girl. I did not know the girl anymore, I had forgotten what had interested her, I could not remember how she had dressed her hair. She had become a stranger, that Anna Marie Hennen. She had been married, and she had given birth, and she had become unhappy and perhaps even mad, but that was not who she had become. She was a traitor to her class, to her people, and this filled her with excitement. She was her own creation, now, and if very few could see any beauty or peace in that creation, the better for her. I had become something, I was not merely created. No person had made me become this woman, and in my daydreams I imagined that John had been changed by me, and not the reverse. I had not been molded by my husband or anyone else. I had been changed by love, specifically the lo
ve of others, and most specifically the ability to love people I didn’t know, and the will to truly know the people I loved without reservation whatever their sins. May you discover that love yourself, Lydia.
I did not miss Anna Marie Hennen, but I did miss my friends.
“What happened to Michel, Rintrah?”
The question surprised him and he dropped his hat. He fumbled it back into his lap and closed his eyes.
“I can’t say. It is too complicated. Where is the General?”
“He’s dead.”
“The General?” Rintrah looked alarmed, as if the porch was about to collapse beneath us.
“No, Michel.”
He looked at me for a long time, straight into my eyes. He was not embarrassed to look at me so closely, as he had been for so long. And I thought to myself, When did Rintrah get such kind eyes?
“I don’t know where he is, and so I reckon anything is possible.”
“Did he run off?”
“That is what they say.”
“And what do you say?”
He sighed. He looked very tired and thin, especially around his mouth, which was drawn at the edges and wrinkled.
“I say nothing. I must leave if the General isn’t returning.”
“He’ll be here sometime, don’t you run off. What happened to Michel?”
He got to his feet and pulled that awful little hat down to his ears. He looked at me as if I might break at any moment, and that he would be very sad when it happened.
“I don’t know what happened, not exactly. Not why it happened, specially. But I know he wouldn’t ever run off. And you know it too.”
“I do.”
“Tell the General I need to speak to him. I need to explain something to him, something he thinks he understands but doesn’t. Tell him to come visit at the house if he has a mind to.”