A Separate Country (12 page)

Later I heard him thumping around the hallway, and I asked Dr. Ardoin to let him in.

I thought he would come to me then, but he didn’t. He went to you, Lydia, swaddled in your bassinet at the other end of the room. He unwrapped you and you cried out. He studied you, pink and blue and white, and he touched your toes. Then he wrapped you up and brought you to me. The nurses tried to stop him. He growled and they stepped back. I held you to my chest.

“She’s all there,” he said.

“You took an inventory?”

“It seemed wise.”

“And if she had been incomplete? Missing something?”

He didn’t say anything. He looked down at us and stroked your tiny foot. It kept slipping out from the swaddling. The nurses were shocked by his behavior, his interest in an
infant
. Dr. Ardoin had already helped himself to the brandy and did not care about anything, certainly not propriety. The little drunk.

John sat down.

“I had not considered that a child of mine could be whole.”

He didn’t hate himself, or what he had been, Lydia. He did not think that you would inherit his wounds, certainly not the physical ones. No, your father only thought, and always thought, he didn’t deserve what he had been given. He didn’t deserve you, he told me. He didn’t deserve
me
. This did not make him sad, he said, it was just a fact. But it was
not
a fact. There is no deserving, there is no explanation for the good that happens, any more than there is a good explanation for the bad. There is no logic. I reminded him of one of the first things that he had said to me:
a reviled man could not take for granted the moments of otherwise forbidden beauties.

“You don’t deserve it, John,” I said, suckling you. “You don’t deserve it, and none of the rest of us do either.” We are all like the reviled man, I said, blessed by beauty every once in a while for no good reason. “Don’t be a fool, and don’t ruin it with explanations. Come lie with us.” He laid that great, powerful body next to us, Lydia, and promptly fell asleep. He loved us, you know, and that’s enough for loving someone back. You don’t need more reason than that.

When you were older, he loved to carry you on his shoulders so you could watch the ants in the magnolia blossoms and listen to the baby finches call out from the nest in the porch eaves.

Eli Griffin

I
let a couple days pass by my window before deciding what I would do next. I lay in bed, or slumped in my bowed cane-back chair, and watched the clouds push in, roiling over each other like dogs at the hunt before disappearing past my window. I listened to the sound of Levi’s factory thumping and screeching below, and I listened for the yodeling of the fruit cart arabs who pulled their bananas and oranges and mangos through the streets below on the chase for the noontime trade. I listened for the ghost of Hood, the sound of hooves clattering and the scrape of a sword come swift out of its scabbard. That would be the sound of Hood’s spectre, if I believed in spectres, which I don’t.

In my rooms there were now two new objects, each wrapped neatly in hemp twine: a stack of green ledgers, and a pile of thin writing paper, each page so thin that the black scrawl upon them seemed written on the sky when I held them up to the window. Two piles of paper, nearly equal in size, alone atop my thin-legged eating table, which I cleaned and oiled once a week. I’d made it myself out of barge wood, I was proud of it. I’d made most everything, and if I couldn’t make it, I usually didn’t want it. So there were no curtains on the windows and no rugs on the floor. No pictures on the walls, no trinkets on the windowsills, no mirrors. I had my books. The catechism and a worn-out Bible. A book of courtly love poetry that I detested but read anyway so I could understand the fops at the clubs, always on their airs and talking nonsense.
Paradise Lost,
which I read obsessively but only the parts I could understand, mostly the parts what talked about the agony of Satan the traitor. I read grammar books and dictionaries when I could find them. I read
City of God
. I read what I thought would help me to burn away the Tennessee in me, the bumpkin in me, and make me into a lettered man, or at least one who sounded like he was lettered. I tried to talk different, and I tried to write things, though I was only half successful most of the time, I reckon, but I kept trying as I’d been trying since I’d arrived in New Orleans four years before, where no one knew or cared who Eli Griffin had been. I’d have killed the bastard who touched one of my books, which I kept neatly stacked on a shelf above the doorway.

I cleaned the windows of my rooms with old cider vinegar and waxed the floors with candles I stole from saloons after everyone had gone down the liquor hole and become too stupid or blind to see me. I’d built a bed and stuffed feed bags full of stolen and scrounged cotton. I’d bought two pairs of blue denim work trousers, two thick white double-sided shirts that could be worn inside out, and two pairs of leather boots, of what animal I don’t know. I wore black suspenders always, and a black hat that sat low over my head, wide brim. I wore those clothes everywhere, I didn’t give a damn. The beautiful ladies in their fine silks, and the tailored men who paid for them, they could poke and titter at me all they wanted. My coin was still good and, you might imagine, I had saved a lot of it by living as something of a niggard. I kept the money behind a loose wallboard, stowed in an old wooden arm I’d bought off an old soldier, which I’d hollowed out. Pretty safe, I thought. I lived as if I had no intention of staying, and I had lived this way for years now.

A lot of that money had come through the good graces of the one other object in the room, the deck of cards worn soft by use and stowed in their own zinc cigarette tin, whose hinges I oiled once a month.

Now, though, those two piles of paper ruined everything. They tipped everything wrong, nothing seemed in its right place anymore.

I knew what I’d been told to do, which was to go gallivanting around the city and countryside bearing loads of paper here, removing them there, searching out a man known to be a killer, and another man known to be a notorious Confederate general and leading citizen.

I knew what I
wanted
to do, which was to burn the damned pages, the ledgers and Hood’s scribblings both. I’d even gone so far as to take them out back to Levi’s burn pile, where I stood for a time trying to imagine my hands reaching out and letting the papers through my fingers into the pungent green-orange flames. Levi came out from the back of the building right then, with an armful of cotton cloth I assumed had been accidentally dyed the color of the river, dull and red and muddy. He tossed his armload on the glowing fire, and the green flames danced up and over it all. He turned to me. He was a small man, and I could look down on him and see the perfect circle of red, slick skin at the back of his head. He’d rolled his sleeves up to his shoulders against the heat of the factory, but he still had his tie knotted up neatly and hung down to the middle of his little round belly. He smiled often, and I liked him.

“On the horns of a dilemma, I see,” he said, rubbing the singed hair of his thick arms.

“What?”

“Can’t decide. What you’re going to do, that is.”

“How did you know that?” I was alarmed. Maybe the whole city knew of my task, shoved on me by a dying man. Now I could see it, every urchin and vendor and priest and waiter watching me pass by and whispering about my chances. I shook my head, it was ridiculous. Levi spoke.

“When a man is standing by a fire with an armload of paper and hasn’t yet thrown it in, it’s usually safe to assume that he is having a problem deciding whether to burn it. The horns of a dilemma, you see.”

A smarter man than I’d thought. A beautiful, dark-eyed woman, head covered with a blue scarf, stepped through the back door and called for Levi. He held up his hand as if to deflect the sound of her voice. His young wife.

“My advice, and this is after years of considering the question, is that if you can’t burn the thing straightaway you shouldn’t burn it. Take it back with you, think on it some more. There’ll always be the fire, but it ain’t a place to be making decisions, and you can’t do a thing with ashes.”

Guidance
. I lay on the bed thinking about that word, and looked over to the two piles topped with neat bows.
Have to do something with them,
I thought. The whole room seemed to tilt toward them.
I can’t live with them, I can’t be the only one
. So I gathered them up, placed them gently in my adventure sack, slipped into my boots, and marched out the door toward Rintrah’s house.

I knew Rintrah, knew him because I’d known Hood. There was a time when one went with the other. Bread and molasses, dace fish and water. They weren’t that way in the end, but there’d been a time when to know one was to know the other. Rintrah had got me my job at the ice factory, and on occasion I’d been useful to him as a cardplayer when he wanted to get money off someone or, better yet, put them in his debt. Rintrah used debts as an enlistment into his army of thieves and politicians and drunks and artists and longshoremen and society boys: once enlisted, you got to serve your time however Rintrah saw fit for you to serve it, and only then was that debt discharged. His debts rarely paid off in cash and that’s how he liked it.

“This way I can buy things off men they wouldn’t normally think to sell,” Rintrah said. “Like convenient blindness, or stupidity, or incompetence. Convenient to
me.
A man don’t think to sell such things, but I
depend
on them. Seems right I should be able to buy them things, a body can buy any other damned thing. I need a man to be sick a certain day, I already bought that sickness when he came into my debt. I need a man not to hear something, I already bought that. I need a man to forget something, I got that in the bank. Nothing would get done if I couldn’t buy a little of the devil off a man from time to time. And believe me, my friend, this city would be a damned lousy place without me.”

I never tired of that speech, though on the riverboats and in the saloons of my childhood and education, I’d learned the golden rule of the underground: pay your own damn way. I always had.

I went to Rintrah as an equal and not on my knees. He could tell me what to do and how to do it. He could tell me how to get in with General Beauregard and maybe he could even tell me where to find a killer with some kind of special relation to Hood. I prayed he might help me, he and his army.

Rintrah lived and worked out of a big and very old Spanish house on Chartres Street, just downriver of Jackson Square. Most people knew him as the eccentric fruit seller on Royal Street, but that was just his way of keeping track of the street and his affairs. From atop his fruit crate he could see opportunity, he once said to me. From atop his fruit crate he ruled all that he saw, or so he said. And when he was done surveying his kingdom, he’d pack up his fruit and push it on back to the mansion where he’d have his servants peel what was left and serve it up to him on stolen silver trays.

A large wrought-iron gallery poked out onto Chartres from the second floor, looming over a broad, arched carriageway that led back to the courtyard far in the distance. The iron railing twisted its grapevines in its center to form the initials
RK
. I paused before walking under the great arch and across the clammy, waterslick cobbles of the carriageway and back into the courtyard. I’d learned that it was prudent to take a look around first. Didn’t want to walk right into the middle of something, and there was nearly always something going on at Rintrah’s that I didn’t want to know about.

But that day there was nothing to see except for the lookouts stationed permanently at Dumaine and Chartres, and farther down at Ursulines Street. They were chameleons, the lookouts, never dressed or acting the same way twice. Today the French boy at Dumaine was wearing a sandwich board advertising a potent cure for sale at the Circle Pharmacy on St. Charles, which just so happened to be made out of ingredients Rintrah himself supplied. The other lookout, a colored boy, was shining shoes down on Ursulines, eyes everywhere but on the shoes propped up on his box. Both boys watched me steady. I turned down Chartres toward Rintrah’s house and disappeared down the carriageway into a courtyard conquered long ago by banana trees and date palms and giant yucca and vining things blaring their little yellow trumpets wherever the sun slipped past the fields of chimneys above. I had nearly pulled out my own knife to hack a path to the table I knew I would find in the middle of the jungle, a place where I could collect myself and decide what the hell I would say to Rintrah, when I heard the little man’s voice calling to me from among the fig leaves, a voice out of the wilderness.

“Come around the other side, Eli, it ain’t grown back that far yet. Got a path on in here.”

I walked around to the back of the courtyard where the wood balcony of the servants’ quarters hung miraculously from the adobe wall, and on it two colored girls leaned and smoked, ignoring me. I found the path and followed it until I had emerged into a small clearing containing one cypress-slabbed table and two similar chairs.

When the garden had been well tended, every tree in its place, every orchid blooming heartily, all the potted fruit trees trimmed into globes, Rintrah had hardly ever come out into the courtyard. The courtyard had been for appearance, the courtyard had been for women and swells who preferred to do their business outside, under the illusion that they were dealing with a landed aristocrat with an unfortunate height affliction, a wealthy jungle exotic, a pasha of Chartres Street. In fact, they were doing business with a brilliant thief who would have preferred to meet in a dark cellar, drunk, and with the sound of a fiddle ribboning out devil’s tunes. But lately he’d banned anyone from touching the plants, which had responded by overrunning their sawed-off cistern tubs and their rocked-in borders, going rangy and twisted and wrapping upon every rail, pole, chair, and downspout within reach. It was an insouciant garden now, uncontrolled. I immediately understood it to be Rintrah’s sanctuary.