A Separate Country

by Robert Hicks

  I must reject the bitterness. I am scaring the children myself. I stomp from window to door, window to door, all day muttering to myself. I have thrown open the window so that Anna Marie might smell the jasmine and sweet olive, the old roses that have gone to rambling across the yard. When she holds my hand it is still soft, though also hot and dry now. I should put down this pen and lie beside her so that she will know she is not alone. I shall.

  I left the lottery thinking we would have to move on, that I would have to pack up Anna Marie and the children and march on up to Kentucky where we could throw ourselves on the mercy of my family. Anna Marie’s family had nearly disappeared. Her father was dead, her mother lived far away around the lake, her cousins had apparently disappeared. We would farm, I knew how to farm. I could make a crop of tobacco, or corn, we could raise hogs. I thought that Anna Marie would make a good farmwife. It amused me to imagine her learning to slop hogs and prime tobacco, I saw her in her Creole best tiptoeing around the hog pen and it made me laugh. But I knew that she would adapt and flourish. She was always less of the flower than I had at first thought, not so delicate as I had imagined. I had to learn this, and I had. I have made no money, what we’ve had I’ve borrowed from my family and some of my army colleagues, and ten years ago this would have shamed me. I suppose I should still be ashamed, but I’m not. If it is for the benefit of Anna Marie and the eleven blessed children, I don’t care what it is or what it says about me. It is an odd realization, to know that the right life is one lived without concern for worldly reputation or success, one that is subordinated to anything good. And my family, my family is good.

  In quiet moments, when I am not so bitter, I wish Father Mike was here so that I could tell him this. I’ve learned humility, not the worldly kind but the kind that causes a man to pale before God. That is what happened to me when I walked out of that lottery building. I fell before God and gave Him my will. And He gave me peace.

  The funeral was quick. I invited almost no one. I saw Eli in the trees but I would not acknowledge him. I had only known him when Anna Marie was alive, and now that she was gone everything was new and threatening. He was a stranger now, a stranger from another place. I was overcome, obviously.

  I had sent the children away, and so they didn’t see their mother laid to rest. All the children except Lydia. She had refused. She was tired, she said, and she worried about me, and when I put her on the carriage to her grandmother’s with the other children she screamed and would not quit screaming until I lifted her back down and took her inside the house.

  I had no words, no tongue for speech. There is a spot on the ground next to her for me. There were no eulogies at my insistence. I wanted the funeral to be quick, for every moment that she lay between resting places was a moment of agony for me, and I thought I might be swallowed up by the hole that had been opened up between the living and the dead by my wife, my friend. At her family’s insistence, we gathered back at the house in the yard after the Mass and burial. I didn’t speak to a soul, and soon they left me. I went inside and made camp stew for Lydia and we ate it on our laps in the living room, the dining room being too empty and dark.

  Lydia had grown much in the last year, and even at twelve years old she had already developed laugh lines at the edges of her eyes. This last year she had learned to take care of the children and to clean and to hoe vegetables. She wore her hair up loosely like a working woman, and her arms had become brown and freckled. She was our daughter and our helper. She dusted, she cooked, she cleaned the young ones, and at slow moments of the day she stood out on the front porch, in full view of the passing menagerie: the men and their ladies strolling past us whispering and hiding their faces behind hats and fans, the silly Mussons up the street who spoke only in French when within our hearing and who gaped at us like we were caged things. She stood up in front of all of them and, hell, she looked proud, dauntless, as if daring any one of them to say anything to her. To any of us, for that matter. She flapped her apron out at the yard, flinging the crumbs and dust away and looking as if she were shooing the world off, too. She was tough, boy, and I believe she got that from her mother. She didn’t care what people thought, as her mother hadn’t, at least after a while. I myself have only recently learned to ignore the opinions of others, and now it is too late.

  I hate these two words, I loathe them: Lydia was. She is in the next room, and we are both coming to the end. I’ve already begun to think of her as someone gone. I prefer to think of the past and not this terrible present. I cannot help my girl. You, whoever is reading this, must understand: I loved all of our children ferociously, but Lydia was special. She had been the first, the first perfect child born to a father so entirely imperfect that he’d forgotten what a sinless being looked like. And there she was, on her mother’s breast, eyes closed lightly, her cheeks pillowed, her nose gently flaring with each soft breath. I will admit that I fell in love with my daughter. She was part of me, like a new limb. Something good. It is all the more horrifying, then, that I spent so many of her years occupied with my business, my reputation, my own life, as if I had one separate from hers, while she was living hers here in this house and wondering where her father had gone. And now we are going together, and she is down the hall and does not recognize me anymore.

  I have decided that I must give this to Eli. He is the only one who will understand these pages. He has suffered loss at my hand, and now I am doing the same, and also at my own hand. We are bound by that, I suppose. He would have every reason to take these pages and burn them as soon as I am gone, but I think that he won’t. He is a better man than I was long ago, when I would have burned them without hesitation. I shall ask him to take these pages and make them known. The other book, the book of infernal war, will have to be destroyed, of course. They are incompatible now, they do not share the same author. I am a different man. He will have to go see Beauregard. I must send for him now.

  I suppose I should pay him something for this, some compensation, I cannot just load him with these burdens as if he is obliged to me. He will not want money, though he needs it as badly as we do. He is proud and stubborn and, most of all, averse to indenture. He will not want to owe me anything, and this is how I will get him to come, to take these burdens. I will tell him that he owes me. For what? For trying to take my life. Only trying, and barely. Still, he waylaid me like a common thief and put the knife to my throat, and I can use this. He owes me nothing for that, and if I had been in his position I would have finished the job and not shown mercy. But I will tell him that he must make amends, because he is proud and he will hate that he might be indebted to me.

  Perhaps he would come of his own accord. Perhaps I am underestimating him. I have made this mistake many times. I lack faith, Lord. And anyway, what shall I give him as compensation? What indeed. I shall tell him a truth.

  Though Eli has never told me, I know what happened to him back in Franklin. To him, and to his sister and her infant child, and to his sister’s gallant but foolhardy beau, and to his father. Between letters to former commanders and colleagues, between the endless tracing of maps, I found time to investigate the mystery of one Eli Griffin, orphan.

  He was a boy when our army marched up from Spring Hill, Tennessee, and toward Franklin, heading straight up the pike not knowing we were condemned men marching to our doom. Near what would become the battlefield we passed several small farms on either side of the pike. We had seen hundreds, perhaps thousands of such farms during the war, but these would be among the last. They were like so many of the rest, homesteads centered on small square houses and dotted with gray outbuildings spilling with half-starved chickens and hogs and rotting grain and old plows polished to gleaming. One of them was the Griffin homestead, though I don’t know which. I can remember the farms, though, and thinking that I had come to defend them, when in fact I would destroy them.

  I have great faith in my own power, do I not? I would destroy them. But I was no god, no destroyer of worlds, hurl
er of thunderbolts. I was just a man who, for the moment, other men would obey. We all destroyed the Griffin family, I was only the first among many.

  Eli’s mother had died years before. His sister, Becky, had become something like a mother to him. I know this from an old woman who has buried the dead, my men, in her own yard and given them numbers and obsessively walks the cemetery as if she were the keeper of Heaven and Hell, ticking off the numbers of the souls. I have forgotten her name. In her letter she told me she had sheltered Eli for a time, but that finally he had run off. She asked me rather plaintively if I had seen him, if he was ever coming home to Tennessee. I never wrote back, which was cruel.

  He is a delicate boy, however he appears. At least, that is how I remember him. If you see him, or hear of him, please be kind. He has not been treated well by this life, General Hood.

  Eli’s sister died in childbirth, carrying the child of one of my officers. He was a young adjutant, I have gathered from the old woman. That was all she would tell me, and so I have no idea who he was, only that he died with the colors in his hand, flapping in the cannon smoke in an impossible charge on a frightful battlefield of my choosing. I wonder if he even knew he was to be a father. He wore my uniform, he had no doubt, as adjutant, handled messages from me to his commander. He had seen my handwriting, my name, on the orders that sent them charging off to die. Where there had been three souls, a mother and father and child, there were soon none. The sister died in childbirth, the old woman said, but she always thought it was heartbreak.

  Soon afterward Eli’s father disappeared. I wonder if he is dead too. Or one of the wanderers who live by the river bridges and meander from town to town, waiting out this life among the ruins of war. Such men were a common sight in the southern lands.

  Eli became an orphan. I made orphans, that was my occupation. I confess it, and will confess it to Eli if he ever gets here. One of the thousands, I assume. If I pass on, if I get ill, too, there will be ten more orphans. It will have been my life’s work! My tombstone shall read, He stole their parents. They do not tell you this at West Point. They teach you to form lines, to skirmish, to properly set the deflection and elevation on a cannon, to ride, to dig entrenchments, to properly supply a company. They do not teach you that there will be others on the battlefield who have never studied such things and don’t know they exist, that these people might have lived their lives quite happily never knowing what a cannon sounded like, or the buzz of a tumbling ball shot out the end of a rifle.

  I know what Eli saw the next day. I watched the boys venture out onto the battlefield, slow and amazed, and I assume that Eli was one of them. It is always the boys who go where they shouldn’t, who see what they later wish they hadn’t. I was there the morning after the battle. I woke up to the smoke of smoldering barns and the queer drapery of a thin snow laid on the gouged and torn red earth. I saw it and I didn’t think much of what I saw on that field, having seen it before. Now I see it through new eyes that have of late, so late, recognized suffering as the corrupt and permanent condition of man, something inescapable and best faced square on, for in suffering is life, and its denial is a kind of death.

  Or perhaps these are the eyes of Eli Griffin. Suppose they are one and the same.

  The ground was red not because of the clay, but because of the blood. It had run in rivers, as if it had been prophesied in Scripture, and perhaps it was. The dead lay on the field as if they’d fallen from a great height. Here they had clung to each other as they plummeted to earth, and they were piled limb upon limb. Over there they had struck out on their own and fallen atop themselves, split and twisted and frozen. Thousands of men lay there, having suffered every kind of grievous wound, most too horrible to conjure into memory, even more than a decade on. I shall see those faces again, I am sure: the men without jaws, without noses, with only half a head. I shall see the shattered bones and the swollen flesh. I am not afraid, I welcome my penance.

  We were about to ride out, on the tracks of General Schofield’s Union Army, on our way to our final destruction at Nashville. I must have known that it would be the end of us, but I refused to act accordingly. It was better to be destroyed than to be weak. I couldn’t see the contradiction.

  I paused there on my horse while my staff began to ride ahead, their heads shrouded against the cold and the lingering snow, my cowled and stooped monks. I am certain they thought me half out of my mind on laudanum when I stopped. I bent my head and swayed in the saddle, I’m certain I looked drunk, but I was only momentarily consumed with pain. My leg burned, as it often did, and the only way I knew to make the pain pass was to disappear into it quietly, to keep still and suffer. I did not take laudanum, that is the honest to God truth, whatever the gossips said. Now I wish that I had taken the cure, if I had to suffer the rumors anyway. Hood must have been out of his mind on the tincture, or he’d have never charged that town like that. I wish I’d had that excuse.

  I swayed in the saddle and closed my eyes, concentrating on the pain. Horses could always sense that pain and it frightened them. This time the horse fidgeted around in a half circle until, when I’d opened my eyes, I was looking straight into the eyes of a young blond boy, not one hundred feet off, who was staring at me. Or, rather, at the scene at the feet of my horse. There below me ran the entrenchment the Union had dug, against which my men had flung themselves. Now it had been filled with the butternut brown and the gray of the Confederate Army, an open grave, a human abattoir. I remember thinking, Good, he is seeing our sacrifice, the evidence of our great courage. Fool. Now I realize what I saw in his eyes: he saw a devil on his black horse, mutilated and fire-eyed, possessed and under the command of Satan himself, towering over the spoils of five thousand souls. The other boys walked slowly across the battlefield, daring each other to look. One by one they broke away and ran into the town and disappeared without a word. But the blond boy, he would not move. I believe he was waiting for me to take him too. I nearly called out to him, but there was fear upon him and it gave me strength. But I know now that fear was only part of what I saw in that boy. Had I known to look for it, I would have seen hate and shock and the melancholy of knowing he could no longer be a child, now that he had seen what men could do to men. I rode off.

  I want Eli’s forgiveness. Who was that boy? I don’t know, it could have been any boy, and thus I had decided that it was Eli. In Eli I can find forgiveness. I want to tell Eli that now, or if I had been the man then that I am now, I would have dismounted and held out my hand to him, that I would have taken him home to his father and to his sister, and that I would have protected them. I would have changed his fate, I would have provided for that boy, the only living thing on that field that morning. I would have done it, Eli, I would have done it.

  He will see. I will send him to see my other creation, not an orphan but a killer. Sebastien. The killer and the orphan, the Janus face of my life’s work. I have made peace with them separately, but now it is time for them to meet.

  I am wasting time. My memory will not submit, it plays across fields I’d rather forget even as I struggle to remember when, precisely, I knew I had fallen back in love with my wife, when I became undeniably happy. It was not so long ago. It was only months ago. Or I suppose it’s possible that I never fell out of love with her, I merely forgot about her. And now her memory recedes and I wish I would die and be free to catch up with her, wherever she’s gone. I want to remember the great moments, the crucial moments, but the thing that keeps coming to my mind again and again and again is something of such little significance! It is a trifle, and yet it insists that I remember.

  We had dismissed the last of the servants, and the children were, by and large, in their beds. Those who weren’t pretended to be asleep, anyway, which was good enough. There was quiet. I sat in one of the parlor chairs and I could feel that pain coming on again, the pain in my leg that I had felt on the battlefield that snowy morning, the same pain of the saw and the knife even now, so many years after I�
�d lain upon that surgeon’s table. I closed my eyes. I swayed in my seat. I saw explosions of red and yellow behind my eyelids and I bore down harder on them until I could trace the veins. I let my head rock back against the chair back and could feel every raised thread in the cushion scratch against me. I became painfully aware of everything, even the weight of the ashes blowing gently out of the fireplace on soft hot breezes slipping through a crack in the flue. And then I felt her hands on me, first at the top of my boot. She pulled it off, the boot on my real foot, and the sock too. I opened my eyes. She sat on her knees and massaged the bottom of my foot, the inside of my foot, the hard tendons and bones and ligaments, until I could feel coolness and calm that moved through me and scattered the pain in my other leg. She held my foot close to her, she leaned her head against my knee. I thought about it and told myself no. Then I silently cursed my cowardice and reached out with my hand and rested it on her head. I sifted the black and silky hair through my fingers. She closed her eyes. And there we sat until it was dark.

  She didn’t think I was drunk. She didn’t think I was light-headed on laudanum. She wasn’t afraid of me. She only knew that I was in pain, and that she could make it subside. She knew without my telling her. It seemed at that moment that she had always known me. No, that’s not it. It seemed that she had always loved me. And instantly I thought, I’ve always loved her. I don’t know by what magic this happens, but it seemed just then that between us, between lover and loved, there was something that had always existed, something sacrificial and nourishing and perfect. Love. That is to say, God. I knew God then and for the first time. Afterward He was everywhere, and especially with Anna Marie. In her I found rest, and through her I spoke to God.