A Separate Country (11 page)

“Please excuse me, Miss Hennen, I shall return in a moment.”

He knew my name. Of course he did. He was not a creature of this world. I watched him limp quickly to the door, where a man in a uniform, a Federal officer, was trying to gain entrance. His way had been barred by two young men, one of whom I knew had fought in the late war. Swords were half unsheathed when John got there.

I didn’t hear what he said. But I could see that when he spoke all three of them listened intently. His face flushed and looked angry, but he kept his voice too low for anyone else to hear. Some of the dancers stopped to watch, or to join in, but when he looked up at them stone-eyed they beat a retreat and spun around the dance floor again, looking glad to be out of his way. The three who had been on the point of a fight straightened while he talked, and sheathed their swords. They looked down like little boys caught fooling with Papa’s guns. He dismissed the two Creoles and took the uniformed man aside. Always talking, never allowing an interruption. Finally the man nodded his head, saluted, and stepped out into the night. By now the news of the near battle had spread and the music had quieted for a moment. People watched as John walked back. Back to me, I realized of a sudden. Then they watched me, too, and my cousin let her mouth drop open and tried to mouth something to me I couldn’t make out. He sat down at his end of the settee again, in the dark. He spoke.

“You asked me something before, Miss Hennen.”

“Who are you?”

“John Hood.”

“That’s all, John Hood?”

He looked back toward the doorway and sighed.

“General John Bell Hood, of the late Confederate States of America.”

I slid closer to him so I could hear properly, and I didn’t care what my nattering cousin thought.

“They knew you.”

“Yes they did.”

“So you
are
famous enough.”

“Famous isn’t quite the right word.”

“Respected.”

“Feared is another way of putting it.”

Could a man be so arrogant as to think that men feared him, and also be gentle and grateful that someone had walked across the floor to sit with him? He was either two men or one man of two worlds. I could see this in the way he hid his mangled arm from me and snuck glances at the door, on watch for the other, the harder thing, the one that had maimed him and plunked him down in a dark corner of a bright and perfumed ballroom. He looked at me and his face sagged and relaxed, as if he had just shifted a great weight. I knew that one of the men in John Bell Hood, or one of his worlds, would not hold on much longer. May it be the other one that dies, I thought, and not the soft and funny man I imagined he contained within, the kind man, the man of nearly childlike enthusiasms and hopes I believed was sitting on the settee with me. I had prayed to meet such a person, but I hadn’t thought he would be so strange.

After the ball he came to court me. Father, a big man with perfect olive skin who wore ties with perfect knots, was nonplussed by the man. He had been
trained
to be skeptical of the
américains,
you see, though they were not such different men. Here, on his doorstep, was a general, a commander of men, large and wire-haired and thick and wounded, asking after his daughter. Father always gave John a good cigar, but left him to snip the ends himself, which was difficult because of John’s ruined left arm. Father noticed, but let him struggle anyway. I’m not sure if this was cruel or respectful.

My parents had known since I was a girl that I’d do what I wanted to do whether I had their blessing or not, so they gave John and me permission to be seen together in public. In public, where their army of aunts and servants and cousins and friends moved about and made their notes. Had John and I been forced to meet on the sly, in the dark, in the underworld of the city where there was music and drink and places to kiss under great spreading figs in secret courtyards, my parents’ army of spies would have been lost, blind. In the daylight I wore my finest day dresses and maintained a respectable distance from John when we walked, down by the riverside and up Esplanade Avenue, then back down toward the market for tomatoes and oranges. I would not be denied the pleasure of a kiss under the fig tree, though, nor the thrill of disappearing into the dark with my man to see the riverboat men play for extra cash in the saloons where the colored girls sang. I would sneak out, tell lies, dress plain and dark like the servants who walked across the city to clean the houses of my people, all those coloreds and Irish and Germans. My parents wouldn’t have to know everything.

When we’d been courting for a few weeks, I began to show him our streets. He had been a country child, and then a man who lived on horses and slept on the ground. I don’t know that he’d ever walked the streets of a city. Perhaps Richmond, but what was there to see there? He was embarrassed by his limp, but soon, after many months and miles along streets he could not pronounce, his leg became strong and he hardly wobbled on that wooden pin once he had a little speed.

We met boys recruiting clients for the opium houses and others recruiting souls for the Church. They spoke French like Creoles and English like Irishmen.

There was a dwarf, a fruit seller who also sold tips on the horse races, and this man became his friend. On the Rue Chartres we’d find him, wide-legged upon a fruit crate, pulling at his great mustache, greased and black, shouting about his pomegranates.

A typical Saturday morning:

“General! I’ve got oranges and I need the money.”

“You dress better than I do, Rintrah.”

“Yes, but who don’t, mate? Got nothing to do with wanting to be buried proper. Expenses gone up.”

“Surely they would give you a discount, friend? A volume discount?”

“I want a damned full-size coffin and a real grave marker. No one got to know my affliction when I’m dead. The marker don’t got to say, ‘Here is Rintrah, Who Could Walk Under Horses.’ I’ll be a man like any other. Now buy some oranges.”

John enjoyed the moments with my little man, my friend. Rintrah looked every bit the gentleman down to his thin, delicate shoes. He wore black like a Creole and cocked his flat-top hat like an Irishman. Rintrah amazed and humbled John. He owned a house and carried a cane sword. He was not afraid, not to be seen nor to be threatened. He was strong. I know that John came to think of Rintrah as a superior, an example, a mentor. It was a measure of John’s foolishness and sadness that he, at least at first, thought his afflictions matched Rintrah’s.

I had known Rintrah for many years. We are the closest of friends, though we hardly see each other, not as we did long ago. Our friendship was nearly impossible to explain, at least to someone so new and innocent like John. Yes, innocent! Perhaps the most innocent man I ever knew, about nearly everything but killing and war. I worked hard to shatter that innocence, but he was hard to conquer.

At first I didn’t tell John about my past, and neither did Rintrah. There was no point to it. The little man had not always been such an upstanding merchant, an example to crippled generals, but how to explain this? Goodness, Rintrah was not upstanding
then,
when John met him, and he never would be. Rintrah had his reasons for this, of course. So, John was missing a leg, yes, and most of the use of an arm. But what had Rintrah missed? He was always the little man, unable to hide. He had been given the part of the world no one cared about, the life below the gaze, the space that was dirty and untended, scuffed by boots and clad in an unceasing course of stucco and mortar. Above, out of sight, hid the delicate filigree of gable carvings, iron twisted into flowers, the reaching and grasping hands of saints lifted up to the Lord on tapestries and high into colored windows. Rintrah had seen these things, of course: propped up on a chair, lifted onto someone’s shoulder, in a painting. The problem had not been that they were unattainable, but that they had not been meant for him. Nothing had, not out of spite but out of forgetfulness. The world of men forgot Rintrah. No one forgot the General, and it was the General’s world even if he limped and clunked down the banquette. John thought Rintrah’s hopes for death were jokes, the little man’s way of banter. I knew Rintrah longed for death, and also that he would never hasten it. The idea that he would miss something, not see something he might have seen had he been more patient, had sickened him his whole life. He would not willfully cut short the chance he would see something new. So he waited for death to come to him, and then there could be no regret. In the meantime, he ruled his bright corner of the demimonde, a far more powerful man than most people knew. Boys twice his size spent their days running his messages through the Vieux Carré, spitting tobacco all the way.

I’m glad John came to enjoy his company. He was funny and interesting and watchful with Rintrah. John did not treat Rintrah as a curiosity. He silently bargained with the man that, if extended the same courtesy, he would treat Rintrah as a whole man unremarkable but for his wit. They would poke fun at each other, trade gossip, and part as men and not fellow cripples.

“You might want to get your own self measured for a box, General. You never know when the demon coming. Never.”

“As long as he doesn’t look like you, all is well.”

“Can I have your leg when you go? I need to fix my banister.”

Rintrah was but one of the landmarks of the street. I dragged John around to show him the city I had known. I told him I was merely offering the grand tour. The truth was that I wanted to be the one standing alongside him when he discovered the secret courtyards, the ecstatic rituals of death at Congo Square, the cabals of old warhorses endlessly plotting a French restoration while sipping liquor from small bottles at Maspero’s. I wanted to explain the beauty and refinement of the brothels, the domains of the exquisite octoroons. I wanted to bring him to the Ursulines so that he would know the nuns and not fear them. I wanted to explain the plagues and the floods so that he would know we were only tested, not punished. I wanted him to sit in the wet courtyards below the palms and among the iron plants, hidden from sight and watching the sun carve its track across the unmarked sky. I wanted him to see and smell the swamp, to sense the miasma drifting out and among the town houses and cottages and American mansions, carrying threat and making us humble. I wanted him to see these things first, so I could explain. I
wanted
to explain. I wanted him to love it, filth and wonder and all, as I’d come to love it. I wanted him to stay so that I could stay beside him. I taught him a little French so that it would make sense when the old men cursed him on principle, for being American.

Whether he fell in love with the city or me, you’ll have to ask him yourself. He stayed, whatever the reason, and we were married.

Does the reason matter? It does not when I wake and the light through the tall windows draws little dark shadows in the crevasses of John’s muscular, broad shoulder and back. He stirs, the bed trembles, and I can hear the rough sheets of cotton drawing across his bare skin. It does not matter when I flush, listen to him breathe, and loosen the ties of my peignoir. He has not cured me of everything. I am a woman and he is a man. I have ten children, and that is the fact of me that shocks the society ladies most of all: not being pregnant, but their imagination of all those moments just before. I am now older, and I touch my husband. He stirs. The linen curtains push out the window in the breeze as if displaced by our breathing. His leg, where it was divided, is smooth as if polished. He is power and blue eyes. He absorbs me, releases me, annihilates me. When I was young I devoured him, he was a powerful man, your father, made more powerful and primal by his wounds, the absences in his body. I found myself thinking of his wounds when we were tangled up together and moving swiftly. I wondered who had fired the round that had severed his leg, and what he had thought lying on the field without it, and how it had felt once the pain had subsided. Did he feel lighter, did he feel any pleasure in the relief of that great pain? I felt pleasure, I certainly did, feeling him hot upon me. It was all so mysterious. Whatever had battered his shell, he was still ravenous. I blush to think of it. I was constantly with child. The strange heat of pregnancy smelted contentment, anger, misery, joy, and the nearly overwhelming desire to run away, and I gave in to urge after urge, mood after mood, desire after desire.

May you be so absorbed someday, Lydia. And my Lord, may you be old when you read this! I would not mind if you made a religious vocation for yourself, but I do not want to drive you to it in horror.

Cover your eyes, but I cannot censor this small tract. This pen will not allow it. I shall write one thing of use with it, and that thing shall be entirely mine and truthful. I refuse to leave behind only the whisper of my modest skirts in quiet salons, the fast-fading sound of my polite laughter at table, my string of worn rosary beads. I will leave one more thing, a thing that is only mine. Why do I write as if I am dying? We are all dying, but I shall live many more years to pester you,
ma petite.

I suppose it is the child I bear, the eleventh. Bearing a child is a little death. A part of me revolts and then abandons me. Or perhaps it is just very hot today.

As I said before, you were born the day after our outing in the coupé, the day after that pinched old Creole nearly got beaten by John.

I remember that it was still and gray, though it did not rain. Dr. Ardoin and two nurses stood by. John circled the house on foot, endlessly inspecting the plantings, always pausing beneath my window to listen before moving on. I watched for him while you slowly made your way into our world. Once, he carried a spray of asters, the next time round they were gone. You pierced me, Lydia, and filled my body with an ache that tightened and loosened until I felt no longer human. Only a vessel. I shouted out at last as your body slipped from me. I had been staring fixedly at a cobweb in the mullion of the window. John stopped and turned as if to crash through that window and save me. Then you began to scream, and the nurses began moving about urgently, and I could see that John was in a state. I prayed he would look at me, and he did. I smiled at him before leaning back to take the last of the clenching pain. When I looked back up, he had gone from the window.