A Separate Country (3 page)

I began to protest his description of me, but he was right enough and so I stayed quiet. I looked down and saw the edge of his bed-sheet twisted up in my fist. My family had disappeared like water into the soil, but I had no earthly idea what would have become of me otherwise. It weren’t worth thinking about.

He went silent for a few minutes. His whole body seized up. I thought his eyes would pop. A small trickle of blood ran from his nose before his body relaxed. He was as exhausted a creature as I’d ever seen, as if he’d been awake since they crucified Christ. He had only a few more minutes of words in him. He knew it too.

“I have tried to make amends, anyway. I believe I have acquired some wisdom, I think I understand now. That’s the story in the other book. I believe I’ve done my penance, and I want the children to know this. I want my countrymen to know it. This is an important task. My associate said you would treat it that way.”

The eyes rolled. He wrenched them back again.

“Get the book from Beauregard. Destroy it.”

I nodded.

He coughed. “I cannot be the judge of whether I have fought my sin successfully and done my penance. Neither can you, you are too young. If I have succeeded or failed, the evidence is in the other book, the true book.”

The light was going out in him. The blood drained out of his face.

“You want it published,” I said. “That can be done.”

He reached a hot, dry hand for my own. He held it and tried to squeeze it like he might have when he was powerful and wanted strict attention. Now, I could barely feel the hand move against mine.

“No. Or perhaps later. If you think it’s good. But first, you will take it to a man who can judge my humility, whether I have made amends. You will ask him to read it. He will refuse you, but you must insist. Then you ask him a question.”

I waited while he coughed, and then I wiped his mouth with my handkerchief. He nodded in thanks.

“You are to ask him if the mark of the Devil has been removed from me. If he says yes, publish it as you see fit.”

“This ain’t right. No sir.”

“And if he says no, you are to destroy that book also.”

I dropped his hand. He closed his eyes. Yes, I would do what he told me to do. I would make him this gift, though it was craziness.

“What is his name, Hood?”

“His name is Sebastien Lemerle. You will read about him in the book. It’s all in the book.”

“Where does he live? How do I find him?” I had a hundred questions, but he’d begun to babble. He managed to say only one more thing that made any sense.

“Take care with him, he’s a killer.”

I grabbed his hand, hoping to yank him back to my world for one last moment. “If I burn everything, what will I tell your children? What am I supposed to tell them? What do you want them to know?”

But he was out of his mind and tore at the bedclothes I tried to draw over him. He grabbed me by the back of the neck and pulled my face down to his so that those hard, blue, stone eyes were all I could see. They looked into me as if I’d stolen something and hidden it in my skull.

I knew not to deny a man at his death. I would have done his bidding merely because he asked. I wish he’d known that. I was a better man than he knew. He fell asleep, and I’d never see him awake again. I began the job he’d set me to. Get it over with quick, that was my thought. I went down the hallway again.

I knew that in his library I’d find piles of paper, hundreds of piles on chairs, tables, his desk, the windowsill, each of them a different height as if they had grown independently like children of his mind. How was I to know which was the preferred child, the all-important book?

The library had always been an unlikely place for a general. It was pink. Light pink, almost the color of a young conch. There were no shelves and no books. The white curtains twisted and ballooned in the slightest breeze like steam, and through them the yard and the street seemed soft and temporary, always about to fly off or change as the shadows shifted. Hood had worked at a trestle table, surrounded by his piles of paper and a few rag rugs. Light played off the tall walls and the desk. It was a room for sewing, or practicing music, not for generals.

I looked for a new pile of paper in a place of honor, a pile neatly arranged with a cover or a title. I saw nothing like that. His inkwell was uncapped and the ink had dried hard to the bottom. I saw no pens, no sign of any book he might have written. The only things out of place were the papers scattered on the floor around the waste can, some of them crumpled. I stopped to pick them up and throw them away properly.

I picked up the first piece of paper and the large and glistening wood roach that had been hiding underneath ran over my hand and into a dark corner. I suppose it’s possible that but for that critter I would never have found the manuscript. A roach scuttled across my hand, I looked down in surprise, and on the paper in my hand I found these words:

When I met him, Eli was a silly boy
.

I began poking through his trash, looking for more. I have a sinful man’s appetite for the secret thoughts of others, especially when they concern me.

There wasn’t much more about me, but every one of the discarded pages contained something I’d never heard the General say. I found pages on regret, pages on love, pages on sadness, and yes, pages on humor. The war was on those pages, too, but not the war as a general would remember it. A humble man, no general, had written those pages. This was the new manuscript, it couldn’t be anything else. The pages were moments of a man’s life, and so they were rough here, fine cut there, lollygagging, wandering, quick. He was thirsty, like a man cutting corn in August, but not exactly like that. Got no words of my own for it. They were the confessions of John Bell Hood. I could see that.

The book had been scratched out in fading ink, sometimes only a sentence on a page, sometimes crowded so full of letters and words it looked as if the page had cracked into a thousand pieces. He had not numbered any of them. I began to order them while kneeling there by the rubbish can. I found the rest of the manuscript shoved between the bookcase and the wall.

For that pile of paper I traveled the city a dozen times, tracking people down. I went into the wilderness, too, into the swamps. I knew very little about the Hoods until I found those crumpled pages, and after I found them I couldn’t do much else but read them and obey. They worked magic on me, made me dumb for everything but puzzling out those pages and obeying their commands.

An hour passed. The last of the pages were stuck in a strange book by a fellow named William Blake, and I was reading that crazy book when I heard a knock.

“General Hood?” A voice from outside.

I got up and looked out the window sideways. Down toward the front door I saw a little man with no chin and a black, drooping mustache standing at the front door.

“Are you there?” He rapped at the door with his first knuckles, dainty but insistent. I knew him.

“It’s Doctor Ardoin. Is anyone home?”

The little doctor should have stopped in days before. I snatched up the papers and, having no coat or bag, began to stuff them in my pants.
The doctor shouldn’t see them.
I was just walking down the hall, trying not to jostle them or make much noise, when Dr. Ardoin let himself in.

“Mr. Griffin! How nice to see you! Have you been to see our patient?”

What else would I be doing here?
I held my tongue and stood stock-still, stuffed like a scarecrow.

“Yes, Monsieur Ardoin, I have. He is off his head and Lydia is dead.”

“Oh dear. Poor girl.”

“That she was. Now she’s just dead in her bed. Don’t know if anyone knows when she died. Do you?”

“Mmmm, well, it’s hard to say.”

“Don’t matter. Reckon General Hood is not long behind her. I’ve tried to cool him off, but there’s not much else I can do.”

The little man shook his head sadly and fiddled with the brim of his homburg.

“No, nothing to do now. A great tragedy.”

“Don’t know what’s so great about it.”

He picked up his bag and brushed past me on the way to the bedrooms. I made only a very slight papery sound, which he didn’t seem to hear. I waited until he was a good piece away before waddling stiff-legged toward the front door. I thought if I could get outside into the garden, I could stash Hood’s pages somewhere safe before going back inside. But then the doctor called.

“Mr. Griffin, are you there?”

“I’ll be right there.”

“I need your assistance.”

I waddled for the door.

“Mr. Griffin, please. Now.” I couldn’t refuse him again or he’d think I was hiding something, and men like Ardoin don’t know how to leave alone the things being hid from them, got to root ’em out.

And so I returned to Hood’s bedside. The pages made me sweat, and I worried about the ink. (Later M. discovered that some of the words got themselves tattooed on my back.) Hood had sunk deeper into the bed. Ardoin held his wrist with two fingers like it was live crab ready to snap, and he held a wet handkerchief to his own mouth. I leaned over to mop the cold sweat from Hood’s brow, and while I did that Ardoin went and sat in a chair pushed into the corner. He watched and stayed away.
Tsk, tsk, so sad
. When I left Hood was still alive, though silent and unseeing. I walked slowly home, looking behind me for the pages that slipped out and lay on the ground in my path.

When I returned to the house the next day, Dr. Ardoin and a small crew of Irish laundresses were busy cleaning up, balling the sheets and clothes that needed burning, opening up the whole house to the air outside, and scrubbing the floors. I should say the
women
were busy. Dr. Ardoin only sat in that same corner of Hood’s bedroom, out of the sun and half in the shadow of the plain cypress wardrobe. He puffed at a straight pipe fashioned in the shape of a growling gargoyle and scribbled some notes. Hood and Lydia had both been removed. The doctor rubbed his eyes with his free hand while bent over his notes, which I guessed were an account of Hood’s death and the doctor’s own heroic efforts to save him. Newspapers loved that kind of horseshit when someone famous died. The death of the General would get their attention.

“Morning, Doctor Ardoin.”

He looked up with big hound eyes, as if the only thing he had wanted in the world was for me to appear in the doorway. He smiled, I crossed my arms and nodded. He smoothly slipped his notebook into the pocket of his coat.

“A terrible night, friend. He did not go quietly. Much yelling, carrying on. Visions! A horror!”

“Surprised he lasted into the night.”

“Ah, the will of the man! The bullheadedness, the strength. He fought like a wounded lion.”

He raised his eyes to the ceiling, and I reckoned he was remembering to remember that description.

“He was tough, sure enough,” I said. “Did he say anything?”

“Oh, so much. A rather patriotic defense of the late Confederacy, a poem—”

“And what did he really say?”

Dr. Ardoin looked at me close, frowned, but didn’t say anything. I reckon he thought I wouldn’t rat on him, even if I disliked him.

“Have they cleaned Lydia’s room?”
Better get my business done and get out,
I thought.

“I believe they have.”

“I’ll go make sure they do a fine job rifling through her things.”

“Mmmhmmm.”

He had returned to his notes. I turned to leave.

“Mr. Griffin.”

“Yes.”

“If he
had
recited a poem, what do you think it would have been? Something heroic, no? But short?”

Good Christ. I walked away.

“Probably a psalm,” he said to no one.

*   *   *

If the charwomen had indeed been poking through Lydia’s things, they had probably found nothing to interest them. Nothing obviously valuable, that is. What would a woman want with a child’s things, especially those of a child whose family was well known to be poor. The silver lockets, the ivory-handled brushes, the place settings, all that had once been part of their rich lives, they’d been sold off. I was sure of that.

But I knew there
was
something to be had in that room, and I aimed to get it. I’d remembered it the night before, unable to sleep and spending the time counting M.’s breaths. I lay flat out in the moonlight, staring up at the shining white face of it. When I got tired of M.’s hisses and whistles, I turned to counting the moon’s flaws. Then I got up and tried to keep reading Hood’s book in the dark, but it hurt my eyes. And then I remembered. I nearly jumped up and ran across the city just then, but thought better of it. Too many knives and garrotes in the dark. Wait to morning.

A month before, at Anna Marie’s funeral, I had stood at the far edge of the mourners, who were mostly Anna Marie’s cousins. I didn’t listen to the priest, I’d heard the service too many times before.
Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis,
I heard it in my dreams, I knew it all, though I still got no idea what it means. I watched Lydia instead. She had her father’s long, straight nose, his high brow, his small ears. She had his same quiet and tired face. The face that made her daddy look sad and mysterious had made her look beautiful and fragile, even at ten. She wore a blue dress, no trimmings, and dark blue shoes with new paint on the heels. She did not move while her mother was committed to the tomb.

At the end of the service, I watched a cousin, maybe a great-aunt, approach the girl and pull her behind a tree to yap in her ear. This woman could have been the resurrection of Anna Marie Hood: she was dark, slim, simply dressed, and she waved her hands and made faces just as Anna Marie had done it. That day she was a woman who wanted to be heard and obeyed, no mistake. Lydia kept saying, “But Aunt Henriette, please!” Over and over.

In her arm Aunt Henriette carried a small bundle of ledger books. She held them dangling from her fingers. I tried to get closer, but there were mourners standing between us. The woman appeared to be pushing the ledgers on the girl. Lydia shook her head and gnawed at her knuckle, eyes big. The other mourners finally trooped out of Lafayette Cemetery, leaving only the four of us—the lady and Lydia, me and Hood. Hood kneeled before Anna Marie’s tomb and prayed. I stepped behind a tree so he wouldn’t notice me, and so that I could watch Lydia, see if she needed help. Hood hadn’t said anything to me, and I reckoned he’d want to keep it that way. I tried to listen to what the woman said to Lydia. Then I thought,
What the hell is Lydia doing here, anyway? She should be gone, out of the city.
Later, when she was dead, I heard that Lydia refused to leave her mother behind.