A Separate Country

by Robert Hicks

  “You know he won’t.”

  “Ask him anyway.”

  Rintrah walked off, up Third Street toward St. Charles, and it was only then that I understood that he had walked all that way from his dark, cold house and I had never invited him in.

  CHAPTER 24

  Eli Griffin

  To the poorhouse. I reckon that just after he wrote those words, he just got sick and lost his will. I know this: he never wrote another word that I know about, and certainly not anything as ridiculous as what Beauregard claimed was the man’s last request, that his surviving children be split up and sent away with the scattered members of Hood’s old Texas Brigade. Shit. But this is a matter I will take up later.

  I have faithfully recorded the words of Anna Marie and General Hood here, I haven’t left a word or a letter or a period out of any of it. You will understand, then, why the end of it made me miserable. The story was only beginning, for Christ’s sake. Even I, a cracker-ass grifter and ice attendant, who had only just acknowledged the presence of something other than a business transaction between himself and M., my beautiful and hardmouthed Irish lass—even I could see that God had played an awful trick on them, that they had found some kind of secret about love just in time for death. I am not a sentimental man, but it couldn’t end there. If it ended there, shit, why should it have ever been begun? Why should anyone begin, why should anyone try to love anything, if all that’s going to happen is that you suffer, and suffer some more, and then just when you’ve come to the end of that suffering and found some peace, off with your goddamn head, off to the cemetery with you, here’s a tombstone. I was angry.

  And because I was angry, the story did not end there.

  Because I was angry, I ginned up some courage for myself and went riding on down south, into the distant swamps that bled finally into the sea just past the last hummocks of land at the bottom of the world. The old man at the tax office said Lemerle had sold his property in the city the year before and that he’d left only a brief note in the file: Gone south.

  I lied to Rintrah. I told him I knew nothing more about Lemerle, that I still hadn’t tracked him down. Rintrah absentmindedly tossed a fat orange in his right hand, up and down, nodding his head.

  “You’re either a hell of a lazy young man, an idiot, or a liar. I’ll be kind and say you’re an idiot. But you better not be an idiot much longer. Ain’t many more days left for being an idiot. You got one day, in fact. After that, I’m going to think you running a game on me. You running a game?”

  “No sir.”

  “Now I know you running a game on me, calling me sir. One day.”

  He put the orange back in its crate and tipped it up on a brick so the negro ladies in their bright tignons and the bearded white Creoles in their tall black hats could get a good look. Down the street, I could see one of Rintrah’s men, a slim dandy in a sky-blue suit they called Dagger Don, watch me closely. He picked his long yellow nails with a short blade.

  I began to walk off.

  “So where you going today?”

  “More of the same. Got one more day, right? Might get down on all fours and go sniffing out after him like a redbone.”

  “Go to Hell, Eli.”

  “We’ll see.”

  I walked back toward the Shell Road where I could hire a horse, and prayed he wouldn’t notice when I’d disappeared from the city.

  When Lemerle said he’d gone south, this turned out to mean he’d gone on down into the flat and marshy Terrebonne Parish, back off a little bayou in an Indian camp. You could tell it was an Indian camp from the little perfect hills that ringed the clearing, some of them full of dead Indians, some of them full of broken pots and oyster shells. It was a strange place to make a home, most people avoided the old Indian settlements for fear of what kind of red man’s houdou might be on it, haunting the place. I’d have thought an old Indian killer would have steered far clear, but this wasn’t the case.

  It was a long ride, and as I went the road became ever more narrow and straight, and the cottonwood and live oaks and cypresses ever more stunted and twisted in the hard salt wind that stung my eyes whenever the road turned due south in the direction of the ocean. I had time to think, I had the quiet for thinking. After a couple hours I’d got so far away from the city and its noise that my ears throbbed and hummed, making noise out of nothing. Like they might fall off and die if they didn’t have something to hear. But down there in the parish, only the insects made any sort of noise, and then it was only a sort of hum, sometimes a trill. It took some time to get so I could hear the birds and the slap of a bream tail on the water, but finally I got my old country ears back, and I felt calm. Purposeful and certain. Strong. The city could never be my domain, I was weak on those streets and in the shadows of tall brick towers. But among the peepers and thrashers, the hot peaty smell of wet wood in my nose, I was a master.

  I steeled myself for the mission, which had grown some since Hood had put it on me. In the saddlebag sat a copy of Hood’s manuscript, which I would show to Lemerle. I would wait for his answer to Hood’s question: Have I cast off the Devil, am I a new man, truly? But I had some questions of my own now. I would ask him about Paschal, the ghost who had begun to haunt me, and if I didn’t like his answers—if he dared to lie to me—I would take his head back to Rintrah in the other saddlebag. I would ask him about Father Mike, too, and why the priest saved his life on that day when Hood himself had ridden down into this very country and hunted Lemerle like a coon. He knew more than Hood realized, I was certain. I wanted him to tell me what he knew about Father Mike. And then, maybe I’d kill him anyway on principle, for being unfit to live as a human.

  I was very certain of myself and convinced of my power to whup ass. I was convinced I could kill, though I’d never done it. I should have known better.

  When I saw the break in the weeds and vines off to the right, the dark spot right there in the middle of the trees dusted white with road dirt, I knew I’d found the place. There was a post at the break, a cypress post driven hard into the ground, and from it hung a man’s black hat that had a faded band of woven honeysuckle circling it at the band, and an old gray crucifix woven from split cane leaves. At its base someone had left a small black doll in a torn calico dress, sitting up among a heap of dandelion heads. It was the kind of shrine a child might build. I thought, They saw me coming. I spurred my horse and tore into the brush and down the narrow path. I wanted to arrive in a clatter of hooves and shrieks. I wanted fear.

  I felt foolish when I pulled up finally, a quarter mile down the path, in the middle of the clearing. Three colored and naked children played in front of a rambling barge-wood shack. They looked up for a second and then paid me no mind. I couldn’t tell whether they’d seen me coming, so that my arrival was no surprise, or whether they thought that they generally had nothing to fear from white men come whipping down their lane, rifle slung, horse sweated and angry. It was the latter, I would learn.

  When I asked the oldest to go find Monsieur Lemerle, he told me he was six and didn’t know no Monseiur Lemerle, and then ignored me. He had wavy brown hair and looked nervous. He and his brothers batted around an old coon skull with long pieces of driftwood. I could see a storm rolling in off the Gulf, and had I been in the mood, I might have recorded the picturesque scene in my notebook: the white, roiling mountains of sky, the shiny and dark bodies of the negro children, the sweet yellow of dying cane in the clearing beyond.

  The children had been city children, and two still wore the scuffed and laced-up boots of a city child, but they behaved as if they had never lived anywhere else and as if they had never been so happy. The coon skull was just the greatest goddamn thing that had ever come into their lives, if the expressions on their faces told the story. They were free, dirty, and ran as a pack. The boy waved beetles under the noses of his sisters, and the girls slid frogs down his shirt. These were children Paschal might have seen. He might have even known them by name, something I would
never bother to do. I regret that now.

  I rapped on the front door with the cane Rintrah had given me. I could hear scrabbling inside the place, but no one came to the door. Around the left side, where someone had built an improvised kitchen half open to the elements, I saw something boiling in an iron pot. Steam drifted my way, but there was no one tending it. I’d eaten nothing since the night before. The steam carried with it the trace of potatoes, onions, sassafras, and the musk of some kind of beast, fish or fowl, possibly both. It began to boil over and so I walked over to take it off the rusty old stove, giving it a stir first. I dipped the ladle in, drained it against the side, and took a bite. Then a second. It was thin soup, but once I’d got it on my tongue I had to keep eating. Mullet, I think.

  “Get your own fish.”

  The voice was low and crackling, and I didn’t have to hear the hammer click to know I was in some trouble.

  “Just tending it, friend. Meant no harm.” I didn’t turn around. Either he was going to shoot me or reveal himself, and neither one required that I turn around. I’d rather get shot in the back of the head, I’ve always thought.

  “Who are you?”

  I hadn’t thought of how I would begin, and seeing as how he was the one with the gun on me, I wasn’t going to scare him into cooperating with me, either. What was I supposed to say? Better to start simple when the hammer’s cocked.

  “My name is Eli Griffin, friend.”

  “Oh, then, well, I didn’t know I had a friend named Eli Griffin.”

  “I’m from New Orleans.”

  “No, I’m from New Orleans, you’re an américain. Upcountry, I reckon.”

  “We have a friend in common.”

  “Seeing as how I don’t have any friends who are still alive, I’m going to call you a liar.”

  “I was sent here by John Bell Hood.”

  He had been scratching his finger against the butt of the pistol, but now he stopped. I knew this because as soon as I heard his voice and heard the gun cock I’d been able to hear the slightest flicker of the smallest gnat. Silence. I was standing right over the steaming pot of fish, and I thought my face would just slide off in a pool of nervous sweat. I heard the hammer click down.

  “I wouldn’t call him a friend.”

  “Acquaintance.”

  “Well, he’s a little more than that, no? If he sent you here, you must have suspected that, mmm? I would have thought he’d have sent a man, more, mmm, capable to have done with me, but my luck is still holding. And shit, turn the hell around already.”

  I did, and there was Sebastien Lemerle just as Hood had described him. Shiny and black hair, but perhaps less of it than I’d imagined. Behind him, standing in the doorway to the rest of the house, I saw a tiny, sweet-faced colored woman in a tignon, frowning at me before flouncing back into the house.

  Lemerle stood straight and lean and stared at me. He wore a pair of black trousers cut off at the knees and nothing else. He was brown like an Indian, sinewy and scarred. His chest had scars that looked like the work of a large animal. He glided past me to the pot, pistol raised again and cocked. He stirred it, tasted it, put it back on the stove and closed the damper, all the while keeping the pistol pointed dead level at my forehead. When he turned back around, he was smiling.

  “And where’s your weapon, anyway?”

  I turned and nodded my head off toward my horse, which was happily grazing the brush and pulling out great mouthfuls of vetch, and at the old rifle in its holster swinging crazily and seeming a thousand miles away.

  “That rifle over there? That’s what you brought? I ain’t a goddamn possum, Mr. Eli Griffin. This ain’t hunting.”

  “Didn’t come to hunt you.” I tried to make my breath come slower, deeper. I heard ringing in my ears. My stomach was taking to sick. Even with the pistol at his side, hanging from his finger casual and loose like a jug of liquor, I knew this was a dangerous man.

  “Well, that’s a very good thing, since you’re so awful bad at it. Don’t ever leave your weapon, even if it is a big old rifle that ain’t worth a damn when a man’s got a pistol dropped on you. Shit, I could be covering you with a goddamn leather punch and you’d still be in trouble at the moment.”

  He looked at me thoughtfully, as if I were an amusing puzzle, a riddle he could have some fun solving.

  “He didn’t send you to kill me, did he?”

  “No.”

  “Because if he had, he’d have sent the dwarf. Or the dwarf would have sent someone.” He leaned back against the gunwale of a busted-up pirogue, good for nothing but stove kindling now.

  “Rintrah.”

  “I know that demon’s name.”

  Why did I smile right then? I think it was the idea of the Devil calling someone else a demon, like it was an insult. Hood’s writing, and Rintrah’s raging, had convinced me that the man Sebastien Lemerle was not human, and it had become a matter of faith with me that I would find him out in that swamp prancing about on goat’s legs wielding Death’s own scythe.

  There is not anything colder than the barrel of a pistol pressed hard between the eyes. Nothing in the ice factory is that cold, not even the great pipes clad in ice. I should not have smiled. I went cross-eyed and stared at the long barrel, pitted here and there from the forging. I vowed to play this like poker from here on, to put on my grifter’s face for the duration, assuming he didn’t put me down right then.

  “Is there something funny?”

  “No, Mr. Lemerle.”

  “You smile when I say Rintrah King is a demon. Is he not?”

  Testing me. Wanting to see if I was a man who could be frightened into disloyalty. Someone to despise.

  “No, he’s not.”

  “He’s your friend.”

  “Not a friend. But not a demon either.”

  “I was hasty, then?”

  I didn’t answer, just shrugged my shoulders and looked off toward the stove, where the fish was still steaming, as if I didn’t care what he did with that pistol. He lowered it again, and bent low before me, sweeping his free arm back behind him. A bow.

  “My apologies, I was hasty. He’s not a demon, just a criminal who poisons my people with his cheap liquor and takes life without respect, for whom killing is a business expense paid to brutal thugs.”

  I struggled mightily against the smile, and this time I won.

  “I’m sorry, I thought that killing was your business, Mr. Lemerle.”

  “It was never business.”

  “And what was it?”

  “It was what I am. There is a difference. It is also my art. And when you have lived a life knowing that God has cursed you with only one talent, and that you are less than nothing without it, and that this talent is repulsive and destructive and ensures your entrance to Hell, then you can laugh at me. But I suspect you do not have this problem.”

  He walked over to a seat carved from a cypress stump and motioned for me to come sit by him. At his feet, on the ground wet with leaf mold, as if I were a pilgrim come to his shrine for a blessing. I had no plan anymore. The plan I’d devised on the long ride had been naïve, vain, corrupted by anger. I should have abided by Hood’s wishes, come into Lemerle’s camp with the respect he’d intended for me to show, carrying the words from Hood with honesty. Instead, he’d smelled the conflict on me, the deception, and now I had sat in a clearing in Terrebonne Parish, far from the city, far from any settlement even, where a man with a pistol whose art was killing stared at me, still distrustful. I wished I’d at least told M. where I was going.

  “Now. Why are you here?”

  And so began the strangest day of my life.

  I told him the truth, as well as I could, leaving out the fact that Hood had died. I don’t know the reason. I reckon it was the old grifter’s instinct, to always hold something back, that kept me from telling him the story of Hood’s death. I wouldn’t lie to him if asked, I just didn’t want to volunteer it.

  “He wrote a book, you say. And he
wants me to read it?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “Him, mostly. Also his family.”

  “Sounds like torture.”

  “You’re in it too.”

  “Ah, the whole family of the great Hood. His bastard son too!”

  “I’ve read the book, and I’m fair sure he doesn’t think of you as a son.”

  “Don’t be smart.”

  We were eating bowls of his fish stew, which had smelled better in the pot than it tasted. No spices. Lemerle was on his third bowl, and every once in a while he paused to ladle out some for the children who came up by ones and twos. They were beautiful young things, the boys and the girls, delicate curls drifting down the sides of their faces and across their backs. Some had light brown irises, some of them had green. The children each received their bowl with thanks in cupped hands, and walked off slowly not spilling a drop. The oldest’s bowl contained a fish head and he seemed particularly grateful for it, lording it over the others while the fish stared up at him, white-eyed. They looked at me straight, unafraid, even the littlest, who was naked. Their skin was golden and shining in the heat.

  “But, I reckon he decided he had something he had to say to you, that he had some responsibility to you,” I said. “I don’t know, most of the time I don’t understand the man.”

  “Why would I want to read about that war again?”

  I hadn’t been clear. “It’s not a war book.”

  That caught his attention. He wiped the face of his littlest girl, who was dressed in a cotton sack dress dyed blue and carried a small colored doll made from straw and tiny buttons.

  “Then what is it?”

  “It’s about what happened since then.”

  “Since then.”

  “In New Orleans.”

  “Ahhh.”

  He shooed the children and put aside his stew. He had become grudgingly hospitable, even a little warm, since we’d begun our meal, but now that it was over he brought the pistol back to his lap.