A Separate Country

by Robert Hicks

  Sebastien had disappeared. I hadn’t seen him go. Rintrah craned his neck up at me, or up at the moon, or some such, and hissed, “We’re getting cocked up good on this one. Son of a bitch, he’s going to have us killed, you watch. Lying bastard.”

  I didn’t intend to watch. If it came to it, I reckoned I’d run across the roof and slide down one of the far waterspouts and out into the dark city before anyone could catch me. I was invincible up there on that roof, above everything, even the mist coming off the river. The roof was dirty and the soot came off in my hands like chunks of earth, but even so I felt clean like a man whose got a second chance, like someone who’s a new man. I would be leaving the city soon.

  I sat up there like a cat for a long time. One hour by the bells. I kept looking for Rintrah, and listening for his whisper, but there was nothing.

  I could see over to Rintrah’s house, through the forest of lightning rods and vents and chimneys. During that hour I watched it, close. I imagined I could almost see the hearses moving in and out, the men pulling out the crates of liquor, the negroes climbing in to make their escape from the plague. I imagined that attic room where Paschal had lived his last days and died. I wondered if the bed was still there. There had been so much going on behind my back, out of my sight. Mystery on mystery, secret behind secret. It was too much, I wanted to be gone.

  A fire broke out in Rintrah’s courtyard. Not a big fire, but big enough to send up a column of dense black smoke. I remembered the horses, and nearly slid back down to the ground, but I didn’t dare. There was too much at stake to leave Rintrah behind. Had I been thinking straight, nothing would have stopped me from getting back to Rintrah’s house. But I was thinking like a man above everything, someone who’d got others to do his dirty work. I was half asleep. Fifteen minutes later I understood the mistake I’d made.

  An ugly man with a yellow feather in his hat ran into the courtyard as if being chased by hellhounds. I recognized him instantly, though I’d never seen him with my own eyes. I saw Hood’s eyes, in that box above the lottery, looking down on the floor as they dragged off the dead and as a man with a yellow feather in his hat hurried away from the scene. I saw him through Anna Marie’s eyes, having his drink in the café, watching the old men whisper about him. Hector, the negro killer. I felt Anna Marie’s hate then, just as real as my own.

  He looked behind him, in front of him, below him, whipping around like a man battling unseen things, ghosts. He even looked up, and I don’t know if he saw me or not. If he did, he didn’t care. He should have looked again to the top of the garden wall before he tried to run for the back door of the house. There, crouching, appeared Sebastien Lemerle, his hands full of knives.

  Sebastien leaped to the ground in front of Hector, cutting him off. Hector’s ruined, pocked face glistened. He pulled a pistol out of his coat pocket and began to raise it. Sebastien calmly threw a knife ten feet and buried it in Hector’s right shoulder. Hector groaned but did not scream. He tried to raise the pistol again, but when he did he dropped the weapon. He bent to retrieve it and as he did so Sebastien moved quickly behind him and bound him in his arms. From a distance it was an embrace as if between lovers. I could see Sebastien whispering in Hector’s ear, and Hector shaking his head, no, no, no, no. He was crying, he was praying. Sebastien reached down and inserted his knife and ripped at the back of his leg roughly, hobbling it. This time Hector screamed the scream of hellfire, like he was burning up. Sebastien shushed him and patted his head, but the screaming would not stop. A lamp was lit on the second floor at the other end of the wing Rintrah had disappeared into nearly an hour before. I saw a figure in the window looking down.

  Sebastien hobbled the man’s other leg. Hector screamed like a beast tumbling over a cliff. He fell to his knees and Sebastien walked around to face him. He kneeled down and held Hector’s chin in hand. He looked straight into the man’s eyes, and then leaned forward as if to kiss him. When he pulled back, Hector had no nose. Sebastien spit something into the yucca plants that lined the courtyard. He stood up and Hector fell over, now screaming without sound. Sebastien walked over to the wall that he’d come over, reached up, and pulled down a smoldering thing he slung over his shoulder, sending black ashes lighter than air up toward me. He threw the thing down in front of Hector, and I recognized it as my saddlebag. The fire. It was in the fire. I nearly slipped from the roof, but held on to the near chimney. Sebastien crouched in front of Hector, who had swallowed some of his pain and had quit screaming. Sebastien asked him something, and Hector nodded. Sebastien stood up, looked around at the roofs until he saw me. He called up to me in a voice that was deep and full of gravel, a voice I didn’t recognize. “I’m sorry,” he said. Then he turned back to Hector.

  The Hood book had been in that saddlebag.

  Sebastien lifted Hector from the ground and made him kneel. He ran the knife across the top of his forehead, sending blood spilling down Hector’s face, and prepared to peel the scalp back. Then the figure in the window called out.

  “That’s enough, Sebastien. Bring him in. I have a friend of yours up here who would like to say hello before he dies.”

  “I’ve got no friends, monsieur.” Not startled at all.

  “Bring him up here.” Calm and cold.

  Sebastien glanced quickly at me and then, probably realizing he was giving me away, looked up all the way at the sky and rolled his eyes dramatically, covering for me. He hauled Hector up under his shoulders and dragged him up the back steps and through the door, disappearing into the dark house.

  In the courtyard my saddlebag still smoldered. The book. The book.

  I took hold of the rope around the chimney and swung down and into the open window Rintrah had used. I walked through the room, which was a woman’s dressing chamber, and into the thick carpeted hallway. I walked down toward the light, to my reckoning. I had failed. I pulled the pistol out and held it in front of me as if it could light my way.

  They were in Beauregard’s library. Through a crack in the door that led onto the hallway—there were three doors that opened into the room, which was at the heart of the house—I saw a thin, slight, black-eyed man dusting ash from his crisp-pressed sleeve before tossing the last sheets of a pile of paper into the fireplace. In his other hand he held a pearl-handled revolver pointed at Rintrah, who slumped in one of Beauregard’s horsehair chairs, angry and humiliated. I recognized the paper the man tossed into the fire. It was the scrap paper I’d used to write my own words down. The last of Anna Marie’s ledger books turned orange and green and blue in the fire. Rintrah watched it, his face sagged with sadness and horror.

  I could see the door from the back hallway across the room, and as I watched it was flung open and Hector flopped into the room at the prissy man’s feet. He was barely conscious, and he looked up at his master as if he wished to be put down.

  “The blood on the rug will cost you, Sebastien!” the man called out. “And when I tell General Beauregard who perpetrated this atrocity, he will have your head.”

  He paused, listened.

  “Who else is out there? Is the idiot Griffin out there? Are you listening, idiot Griffin? Would you like to know why I have kept your little friend alive? This abomination, this freak? Hmmm?”

  He kicked Rintrah in the stomach and I heard the uumph as the air went out of Rintrah. He slowly brought his eyes back to his attacker, looking up through his hooded eyelids.

  “My name is Jean Dauphin, and this man tried to steal from me. Sebastien! Do you mourn the death of the priest, Father Michel? This is the man responsible. Listen to me, Sebastien. This is the man who bribed the blind boys at my lottery. My. Lottery. This is the man who got a priest, peace be upon him, to play his role in the swindle, the role that got him killed. This is the man, Sebastien, not me.”

  Then I saw it, for the first time. The lottery man, Monsieur Dauphin, who had the gall to try to enlist Hood in the lottery racket, who had turned Generals Beauregard and Early into his dancin
g puppets, this man of great wealth and resource was scared. His hand shook, his eyes swung from door to door to door, waiting for them to open again. Hector groveled at his feet and he did not notice.

  “Should I have let them steal three hundred thousand dollars from me, Sebastien? Would that have been right? Is it my fault that this dwarf thought that there would be honor among the accursed, and that the blind boys would have loyalty to a half-man? They sold him out! They came and told me about the fix just as soon as he arranged it. He should have known better! Sebastien!”

  I was pushing the door open then, ready to fire my pistol, when a set of big hands wrapped themselves around my neck and lifted me off the ground. Beauregard’s big butler, the one who had chased me out the last time I was in the house. He smashed my head against the wall in the dark, and I saw bright lights on the inside of my eyelids. He laughed a big belly laugh and called out, “I’ve got that killer right here, he ain’t nothing much, sir,” he called out. “He look familiar.”

  “Good, good!” I could hear the sound of relief in Dauphin’s voice.

  I was tossed to the ground and I was preparing to be beaten when I heard a great gurgling, and then the butler fell on me. Something hot and wet ran over my chest where his head lay. A hand helped me up. I couldn’t see. I leaned against the wall and felt Sebastien’s dry hands against my cheek.

  “More to do, mon frère. Come on.”

  He went through the door first, and I followed. Dauphin tried to turn and fire but Sebastien was on him quick and took the pistol right out of his hand and whipped him with it. Dauphin sat down in Beauregard’s chair with a thump, dazed. Sebastien turned the pistol on Dauphin and pulled a second from his pocket. This one he turned on Rintrah, who had leaped from his seat with a big smile on his face.

  “Sit back down, little man.”

  “What is this?” Rintrah shouted, his face red and puffing.

  “Sit. Down.”

  Rintrah sat. Sebastien turned to me.

  “Put your pistol on the desk there, next to the dwarf’s.”

  I’d forgotten I even had it. I was dazed, I was happy to give over control to someone else. I put the pistol on the desk.

  “You are an idiot, Griffin,” Rintrah muttered.

  Now the only person in the room who was armed was Sebastien. He pushed the oily hanks of his long black hair behind his ear and considered all of us. He lingered on me.

  “I thought we would be in time to save the books, but I miscalculated. I am sorry, Eli. And I wasn’t able to track down Hector until it was too late. The fire burned very fast. I am sorry.”

  He turned to Hector.

  “You killed a priest. You killed a priest who saved my life. He is owed, as I’m sure you understand.”

  Hector looked up at him with tired eyes. He was already dying, his skin had turned white and he was shivering. The carpet had turned red beneath him. He nodded his head and turned away from the apparition with the guns. Sebastien stepped over to him and fired one shot into his ear and Hector was still. I coughed up everything I’d eaten since the day before. There was too much blood, I had seen too much killing. It would never stop.

  Sebastien had everything planned perfectly. I wonder now when he devised his plan. Was it after he left us scaling the house? Was it on our ride into town? Was it when Danielle kissed him before going inside their rambling little shack? Or had he been planning it much longer? He might have been making that plan, or something like it, since that day in Texas when he put the knife to his first Comanche. Whenever it happened, he accomplished something extraordinary that night: he stopped the bloody violent cascade of hate and violence that he and Hood had set in motion so many years ago. I remember what Hood wrote, I remembered it even clearer after it had been burned. He’d asked himself if the events of the last two years had been a result of the howl they’d let loose in that Comanche camp, whether the plague and the failures and the murders were the howl itself, which one of them would have to silence. I don’t know about that, I don’t know how God works. God is beyond my understanding, as the priests like to say. I know this: it was Sebastien and Sebastien alone who knew what his atonement would be and stood up to meet it.

  He put down the little pistol of Dauphin’s and emptied the other pistol, the big pistol, of all but one round. He tossed the other bullets around the room where they rolled up under couches and rested against dusty books. He did the same with the other guns. He closed his pistol again, checked to make sure the bullet was chambered properly, and cocked the hammer.

  “Now,” he said, looking at Dauphin, who had just come to his senses after his pistol-whipping. “You, Dauphin, you get up.”

  “You will be found if you kill me.”

  “Tell them how we know each other.”

  “I’ve never met…”

  “Tell them!”

  Dauphin let his head slump, defeated. He mumbled.

  “I will not be held responsible for this.”

  “Speak.” Sebastien said it quietly, almost tenderly, all the time with the pistol drawn on the old con man, the lottery commissioner.

  “I hired you to kill Rintrah and Father Michel.”

  “Who else did you hire?”

  “Hector, that man there.”

  “And who killed Father Michel?”

  “Hector.”

  “And where was I?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I was far, far away on a bayou, thinking I was done with killing. I was wrong about that, no?”

  “Obviously.”

  “I am done with it now.”

  Dauphin looked elated and puzzled at the same time. Rintrah and I were still too scared of Sebastien to move.

  Sebastien turned the pistol around and held it by the barrel. I held my breath.

  “You invited me up here to say good-bye to my friend before he died, so”—he turned to Rintrah—“good-bye. I am truly sorry about your friends, and I hope you will someday forgive me for what I did to your friend Paschal. I must atone for that, I hope I know how. Perhaps someday Mr. Eli Griffin will tell you the whole story of Paschal and me.”

  Rintrah grimaced and told him to go fuck himself, that he’d never forget him, and that he was a coward for letting Dauphin, the goddamn fop, do his killing for him. Sebastien nodded his head and turned back to Dauphin.

  “So, here is the pistol, you may kill the man who would have taken your money if you’d given him the chance. Now you can finish the job. But consider this, my friend. I will be standing here, five feet from you, and if you do choose to use your one and only bullet on Rintrah, I will close those five feet and cut you from ear to ear. If Rintrah dies, you die. Very simple, yes?”

  Silence in the room. No one moved.

  “However, if you choose to turn your pistol on me, you will walk away.”

  More silence.

  “To put it more simply, I want to trade for Rintrah’s life, and I will not give you much of a choice. How much is it worth to you to kill a man who would have merely taken money from you? How much is your life worth? Now, here it is.”

  He handed the pistol to Dauphin, butt first, and took one step backward. He pulled a giant knife from his coat and stood there with it at the ready.

  Dauphin looked confused at first, and held the pistol like it was a turtle that had just appeared in his hand. Slowly his fingers wrapped around the butt and he held it halfway up.

  “I want to ask Rintrah a question.”

  “You may,” Sebastien said, watching him close.

  “Was it worth it, Rintrah? Was all that money worth it? Why would you do such a thing?”

  Rintrah stood stock-still off to Dauphin’s right.

  “We did it for the Hoods. We’d made them poor when they should have been rich. And there’s no shame in grifting a grifter, whatever you say.”

  Dauphin turned to me.

  “And you? All this running around and exposing of secrets that should have been buried and left buried
? Futile! Beauregard is away because he is arranging to have Hood’s book on his war experiences published, and everything else has been destroyed. Beauregard knows nothing about any of this, nor will he ever know anything about it. While you’re here, he’s sending Hood’s children, the orphans, to homes around the country. He’s splitting them up, they may never see each other again. What do you think of that? I suppose you haven’t thought of it. No, you’re standing here. You had to keep asking questions. How many people will die because of your goddamn curiosity? Why did you persist?”

  I was too tired and too sad to say anything else right then.

  “I did it for Hood, too.”

  He turned, finally, to Sebastien.

  “And why would you come back here? Why did you care about these people? You don’t care about anyone, you’re a monster. Why these people?”

  Sebastien closed his eyes.

  “Because Hood would have wanted it.”

  The bullet made a neat hole in Sebastien’s forehead and he fell back. I caught him before he hit the floor and laid him down softly.

  CHAPTER 27

  John Bell Hood

  I wish I had more time. I wish I had more time with her. I wish I had been good to her. I changed, we changed, the poorhouse was warm and full, full of children and talk and humility. But how will it be now, she is nearly out of her mind in the other room, and I can no longer talk to her. I change the sheets, I wipe the sweat from her brow. She holds my hand, my good hand, and that’s all we have left.

  It is a cursed fate. I am cursed. The Lord works in mysterious, brutal ways. How is it that we could come to know each other again, or perhaps even for the first time, truly, and yet have only a year to live with that knowledge and to be guided by it, bound by it. Was that all there was, was that all we get in this life? Brief happiness interrupting the woe and grief? It feels this way now. I must fight the bitterness, the hate. I feel it welling up in me, I want to strike out. I want to track down Father Mike and drag him back to this city to tell me what I am to make of this, my love and his friend, dying with eleven children in the house. Eleven children who I watch all day walking by her door, peeking in and running off. They are quiet and dutiful and scared. What, Father Mike, does your missal have to say about this? Coward, he has run off and I shall not forgive him. He promised me he would remind me of my obligation to God, but what of God’s obligation to me? Has He none? I want Father Mike to answer that question for me.