A Separate Country (17 page)

“And why should I care what you know?” I had only recently learned of his childhood friendship with Anna Marie.

“Because you would not only hear from me if you fail that woman again, our Anna Marie, but you would have to reckon with Father Mike.”

A dwarf and a priest. It was the beginning of a bawdy joke, not a threat.

“Father who?”

Rintrah arranged a meeting in the cold and strange wonderland of Mr. Rouart’s ice factory, and that was how I was introduced to another of Anna Marie’s friends, a giant and hairy priest named Michel, called Father Mike by those who knew him best. After meeting him, had I been told he’d risen fully formed from the rotting leaves and tea-dark water of the backswamp, I would not have been surprised.

Father Mike’s beard iced up while I watched. He was some ancient beast of the far north, picking at the white frost of his breath and gabbling on about women and liquor and his nearly erotic love for the Virgin, whom he merely referred to as
Mother
. We ate cold chicken while Rintrah and the priest related their stories of Anna Marie’s childhood, which they described as nearly feral. I think this was wishful thinking. Those two were the feral ones, or at least primitives. Hunks of chicken flew from their mouths and seemed to freeze in the air, clattering to the floor. (I believe I’m inventing that, but it conveys the truth of what I remember, anyway. They had poor manners.)

This Father Mike wore a bowler and the overalls of a stonemason. A fine gray dust covered him from head to toe, except where the chicken grease had absorbed it and darkened his mouth, his fingers, his chin. In the dim light of the factory, shrouded in gray, he might have been a being coughed up out of the dark, a prophet of the icy dark, if not for the fact that he swore and blasphemed with great enthusiasm.

“Why are you dressed as a mason?” I asked, bored.

“I am building a chapel and a cemetery.”

“Doesn’t seem a priestly occupation. Aren’t you supposed to be slinging smoke around on chains and performing the black magic or whatever it is you do with those crackers?”

“What do you know of a priestly occupation?” he asked kindly. He threw a chicken bone at one of Mr. Rouart’s ice-covered condenser towers and it stuck fast.

“Don’t know much, I suppose.”

“Do you know St. Geneviève?”

“No.”

“She’s the great intercessor on our behalf during times of affliction. Such as when one loses a leg.”

“And she grows the leg back?”

He stomped out in a huff, upending his chair and sending it crashing against the far wall, apparently without his noticing. Rintrah glared at me, grabbed Father Mike’s hat, and went chasing after. When he returned, he read me riot.

“You can think of something better to do when afflicted than praying?” he spat.

“No.” I was ashamed of myself. Perhaps I was jealous of that great, powerful giant who spoke of my wife with a familiarity I myself didn’t know.

“My first instruction to you, General, as you try again to make something of yourself in the business of this city, is this: don’t insult the Catholics.”

“I didn’t mean…”

“Of course you did. Give me his chicken.”

To make amends, I began giving Father Mike a little money for his chapel, here and there when I was flush, and I have to say that I began to enjoy watching the stone worked into figures and altars, the chapel rising as if it had always been there latent in the soil. And Father Mike himself grew on me, though it would be a long time before we were friendly.

When Anna Marie discovered I’d met Father Mike, I saw relief pass across her face. She eyed me warily, for a moment, I suppose wondering what he might have told me, but when it was clear that she still had her good reputation in the eyes of her husband, she smiled.

“Why have I not met this man, your friend?”

She shrugged her shoulders and walked away toward the kitchen, where the cook was braising ducks.

“I didn’t think you cared to know them, John. They are the past and this—” She swept her hands about her, taking in the muddy footprints, the precisely sorted collections of dead snails, the dolls missing the stuffing from their arms, the smudged and scratched furniture, the black shoe marks on the walls. “This, darling, is the future!”

There was something wrong about that answer and I knew it immediately, I just couldn’t say what it was. There was something missing, in both the stories Father Mike and Rintrah had told, and in Anna Marie’s casual dismissal of the subject. Something missing, something
absent
.

Only much later would I realize that it was a person who was missing, someone dear to all three who, nonetheless, they would not talk about. And when I discovered this person’s existence, ten years later, it would be too late.

Anna Marie Hood

P
aschal had taught me to fish. He said it was a survival skill he had inherited by blood. He meant his negro blood. Then he would laugh and watch me run the hook under the shiner’s spine.

I think you were seven years old when we spent the last summer at your grandparents’ fish camp across the lake. They called it The Fish Camp, but it was something more of a small rusticated compound suited for half a dozen families who required that their food be cooked fresh and served daily by permanent staff. There were changing rooms on the beach, and shade for hammocks, and we spent two months there that last year while the city burned with fever.

That summer I showed you and John Junior how to fish. Or, rather, I showed you how
I
fished; your father showed you his way, which involved chicken gizzards and elaborate floating apparatuses made of driftwood. He was an uplander, I suppose that’s how they fished in Kentucky. He didn’t fish with shiners, but Paschal had shown me how to gather the weighted net in my right hand, line in my left, and spin it out onto the water so that it blossomed before it splashed down upon the water and sank down into the dark to trap the little bait fish. It occurs to me now that John couldn’t cast a bait net. His bad arm wouldn’t have allowed it. It’s odd I am only thinking of that now, years later. At the time I thought only that he was obstinate.

We spent that long summer with my my cousin Henriette, her fiancé Gustave, and my parents. My brothers and sisters had scattered to their own retreats, though occasionally they’d ride over to play cards. Only the Hoods ever went fishing at the fish camp. The others tittered and shouted and dove into the hot water of the lake when they couldn’t bear the heat in their hammocks any longer. Henriette read
Tom Jones
to her fiancé and I could hear her giggles across the beach and up the creek all the way to the bald spot along the bank where you and John Junior and your father and I dangled our feet high above the black water. We caught red fishes and white fishes and black fishes, and I don’t remember any of their names. Your father knew them. He brought them back for the servants to eat, since no one at our table would eat anything that hadn’t been hunted or gathered by professionals and shipped in boxes from the best traders in the city. At supper I could smell our fish being fried back in the kitchen, and through the window across from my seat, past my cousin’s bouncing head, I could see the back stoop where the negroes ate the fish straight out of the skillet and nodded their heads slowly, without speaking. It looked delicious, but I never asked them to serve it to me, I never asked them to fry something up for me or any of you. There were rules.

On the days the four of us went fishing, Mother insisted that the youngest children stay in her care, for fear of drowning. Then she would take them to the lake and fall asleep in her lounge where I would find her hours later, the children scattered between the water and the kitchen in the big cabin where there were spoons of sugar and knots of fried bread dough. The children might have hitched up the plus-four and ridden it straight into Lake Pontchartrain without Mother knowing, but they didn’t. They were good children, you all were good children.

In the early afternoon at the fishing hole, you and your brother would curl up between the roots of the oak that shaded us, and your father and I would stare for long stretches at the black pinpricks where our lines entered the water. John always yanked his line out of the water first. I could go all day without ever checking my hook. Not John.

One day he whipped the line out of the water so hard it hooked the branches in the tree behind him, and he spent five minutes plucking and yanking at the line, trying to get it loose without getting the hook in his face. His wood foot, which he had removed from his boot earlier, now punched holes in the earth.

“Why do you do that, John?” I had woken with a head that felt pricked by sharp things. Colors were more vivid, people moved slower. I suppose it was Father’s wine of the night before, he had made it himself, and so it had to be finished. Another rule. Now all things seemed strange. Even the children’s faces seemed thinner and sharper. It made me curious.

“Why do I do what? Try to get the hook out of the tree? Because we don’t have many more, and it’s right there, almost got it. And then I’ll be catching some big fish, I feel it.”

“No, that’s not what I meant to say. Why do you pull your hook out of the water so quickly? If I were a fish, I’d be offended, surely. You serve up the meal and before they get a chance to pick up their knives and forks, you’re whisking it away. Very poor service, John.” I wanted him to laugh. The sun had begun to burn away the wine fog and I was happy to be sitting by the creek with my man.

John stopped pulling at his line, which was now hopelessly wrapped and tied in the branches of the oak, and bent his head down toward where I had reclined on the ground with my arms above my head. I hoped he might give up on his hook and take up with his wife. You two were still asleep. John stayed standing over me, nodding his head.

“I want to know what’s happened with it, I don’t want any fish getting my bait without my knowing it.”

“Just wait until the fish tugs. That’s the accepted sign, Mr. Hood.”

“But that’s not how it always works. They get in there and get out and you don’t ever know it. I mean to catch those little bastards, too, unawares.”

He pulled a knife and slashed at the catgut finally, springing the branch, hook, and gizzard loose. The hook and gizzard flew off into the underbrush. John looked after them and grimaced. He put the knife back in his pocket and sat down next to me. He took up my hand and let it sit limp in his own.

“If a fish makes off with your gizzard or whatever that is, without you knowing it, does it really matter?” I said.

“Of course it does.”

He chuckled at himself. His stinking gizzards nearly always looked as pristine as the moment they’d entered the water. He said he admired my patience and that he wished he had some of it.

“I’m not just impatient, though.” His voice dropped so low it vibrated in my chest, and I sat up.

“I can’t stand not knowing.”

“What, John?”

“What’s happened down there, and what’s happening.”

“You want to be a fish?”

“I don’t want to be fooled by fish. Or anything else.”

Now he squeezed my hand and I was relieved. And scared.

“Men died because I was fooled, Anna Marie. Sometimes I was fooled and didn’t ever know it until it was far, far too late. There’s nothing worse than that, Anna Marie, believe me. Because what could I say to the ones in the hospital torn up by ball and artillery? I couldn’t tell them I’d made a mistake, though of course they knew it already. Knew it better than me.”

I knew nothing about war, but I knew he was waiting for me to say something. His hand began to let loose of mine.

“We are all fooled sometimes, John. That’s life.”

“And death. And when you’ve stepped over the pieces of boys, just children some, who died because you were fooled, see if you find any comfort anywhere in the idea.”

He put my hand down, laying it carefully where he’d found it.

“Why are we not talking about fishing?” I wanted to cry, and I was angry too. How dare he make fishing into something awful and cruel? “What are you trying to say, John?”

“I don’t know. Just don’t want to be fooled, and I can’t stand not knowing if I’ve been fooled. The fish, your family, the traders, my clients, who knows who’s laughed at me? I understand less and less every day.”

I stood up, picked up my pole, and yanked it out of the water. A blue-gray fish (bream, John called it) flew out of the water. It gasped and gaped at the world, it flew in a perfect arc over my head. I saw its beautiful white belly, and to this day I can draw the way its color disappeared into that soft white flesh, and also each drop of water that it left in the air like a track. At the end of its soundless flight it landed on John Junior’s face with a wet thump. John Junior screamed and cried and stomped at the fish, which flopped into the underbrush in the same direction as John’s old chicken lizard.

When John Junior had calmed down, I sent him back to the cabin with you, Lydia. I remember you looking at us, your parents, for a long moment before taking your brother by the hand and telling him there would be no more fish falling on his face, not to worry.

Late that afternoon, when you children had been dressed and sent off to the dining room, John and I got dressed for supper. We’d spent the rest of the day at the lake, sitting in the shade of the bathing cabin’s porch. Your father read the week-old news-paper that had been brought that morning with the day’s supplies from the market. I traced circles on a piece of paper.

My family, our family, were not fish out to fool him. But he couldn’t tell the difference, and I was afraid of what that meant.

John’s blue suit was all he had to wear for supper. He hadn’t known, and I’d forgotten to tell him, that he should order a summer suit or two for dining. The other men had white linen suits with open collars that they wore to table and had cleaned every day by the servants. John looked like a man on his way to a funeral, by contrast. He cleaned that suit himself every day, wiping it down and brushing it carefully at night and then in the morning.