A Separate Country (37 page)

I will never forget that ride out to the fish camps. Do you remember what the city was like? Don’t forget it, you must remember it to tell your own children. (May I live long enough to meet them!) Priests hurried across streets here and there. The carriages of undertakers got in our way on the narrow streets, and when the breeze lifted up off the river as it always did, it collected and carried the stink of the dying and their sweat-yellowed sheets, now burning in barrels across from courtyards where young families still took their late lunches and did not stir at the shouts of the undertakers’ men, or the moans of the grieving in the little rooms above them. The city is not for the fainthearted, of course.
We
would sip wine at our own executions. On another street, I watched families lined up along the sidewalk with tiny coffins at their feet, waiting for appointments with the daguerreotype man who would preserve the last expression on the face of their children. Ghastly idea, I would never do that to you children. God strike me down for even thinking that!

But there was nothing else to think about. The smoke drifted across every street, the mud grabbed at the carriage’s wheels, the sewers ran with the same abominable muck, and yet the only noteworthy thing was the long procession of the dead trundling over the cobblestones toward cemeteries across the city. I remember it was hot, and I draped my hand and arm out the window and down the side of the carriage, where a mighty sow snuffled at it before I could snatch it back. A woman sweating beads down her head and clearly out of her mind, her face a rictus of fear and joy, ran at the carriage and I pushed her away. I didn’t think of how brutal that must have seemed.

Or perhaps it didn’t seem brutal at all, to cast aside the unlucky and forgotten. It was no ordinary fever season. Those who remained in the city, and those of us who had waited to the last moment to leave, could not help but be changed by the effects of isolation and constant reckoning with mortality. This, you must not forget, Lydia: epidemics, whether of disease or of violence or of heresy, rob the living of a sense of the past or the future. All is compressed into
this
day, and
this
night. The living become paranoid, at first vigilant against strangers and outsiders, and then suspicious of neighbors and friends. The things that once seemed important seem insignificant. The formerly pious crave bacchanals; the formerly dissolute make their way to Mass every morning to cower before the Risen Christ. Superstition runs riot, especially in our city of ghosts. Catholics see the voudou priest.
What can it hurt?
the living say with a shrug, once they cease to care.

I wish you hadn’t seen those things, that hellish tableau. The bodies tossed out on the street, the men fighting each other over the spoils of the dead, the women praying for forgiveness and their own speedy deaths. After a while it began to rain, do you remember? The water ran over the banquettes and made it seem that we were galloping out on a mirror multiplying the afflictions of the city.

I’m sure you remember the month out at that fish camp, one of a dozen or so that Rintrah had strewn around the lake and also down the river into Plaquemines Parish. We slept out in tents, where they came from I never knew. We looked like a small army strewn among the cottonwoods and cypress. We used the shack to cook meals and to house the frail, the rest of us slept out on the ground. There were so many children, and at first they were wary of you and your brothers and sisters. They treated you as if you could hurt them, or order them to be hurt. Thank the Lord that John Junior had the sense to wrestle one of the young boys and, when he lost, to jump up with a face full of river mud and throw his arm around his conqueror, declaring him king of the camp. After that, I rarely saw you children. You learned new games, and sometimes you’d sleep in other tents with your new friends. I considered whether you could live like that back in the city, but I resolved not to think about it. It would be impossible, of course, to live like that.

I saw the boy Homer soon after our arrival. He said hello to me. We didn’t talk about that long afternoon that seemed a lifetime in the past, though it had only been a couple months. I watched him move about the camp, I spied on him. He did not join you children in your games and wrestling matches and fishing expeditions. He spent most of his time quietly sitting at the edge of men arguing their fates, and what this escape from the city could mean for their futures. Were they obliged to the Church now? To that underworld fiend, that dwarf? To a
Confederate
general? There was a man who often sat in the center of these discussions, on a stump he dragged from place to place. He was graying and clear-eyed, he sat straight and said little, but when he spoke it was as if there could be no other person speaking in the camp. He kept his voice low, and only on one occasion when the wind was turned just right did I hear what he said.
There are no obligations, and there is nothing that will come of this but your lives and another year of health, the Lord be willing. We are men, and so we should remember the sacrifices these others have made to help us, but we are not indentured to them. They are men of free will, they have their reasons for the things they do, and they do them. God’s gone to separate the wheat from the tares, didn’t He say? We got to live like we believe that. Don’t worry about nothing else.

Homer most often sat behind this man, listening intently with the shadow of a smile occasionally crossing his face.

Finally, after nearly two weeks in the camp, I was carried into the little shack and laid on one of the cots. An old woman with hands sheathed in thin, tan skin, crinkled like crepe paper, tended to me and called for water and the least dirty rags that could be found. She smiled at me, and in that riven face of wrinkles and cracks, I saw worry. She needn’t have worried. After nine other children, I knew when there would be trouble. All I felt was relief, lying there on the cot and watching the spiders string up their webs in the corners for the mayflies and the flying ants. I knew that the child would be safe, that he would be a boy, and that his name would be Oswald. The rest didn’t share my confidence. I suppose I looked old and frail to the young girls who came and went with pails of water on their heads, eyeing me furtively. The graying man brought his stump to the front of the shack and informed the rest what was happening, that they needed to stay out of the way, and that someone ought to go find General Hood, who was at that moment inspecting one of the other fish camps. This man also said that the child would be a blessing on all of them, life before death, and he picked out three women to take care of my children while I was in the bed. “You done took care of white children before, ain’t no different now. These are good people now, you seen that yourselves. Be good on them too.” I listened to his speech through the chinks in the shack and was brought nearly to tears.

Oswald came just as I expected, much to the surprise and delight of the old wrinkled woman who had detached him and scrubbed him and swaddled him off to a wet nurse nearly before I realized he was out and in the world. The pain had been sharp, piercing, and short, thank the Lord. Even so, I was very tired and I slept once John had arrived at the shack. He held my hand.

A day or so later I was still in the cot, still light-headed and in and out of dreams, when Homer and the gray-haired man came into the shack and sat down at the foot of the bed. Homer said hello, said he was glad I wasn’t dying, and then introduced the man as his stepfather, Mr. Plessy. The man was not at all uncomfortable around me, as so many of the others had been. He sat there as if there was nothing terribly special or scary about a white woman in her bed. I found this surprising, and then comforting.

“Homer says you the lady who went to see those three poor folks die in their house, the day I sent him with the shoes. Was that you?”

“Yes.”

He nodded his head.

“Do you know who they were?”

“I don’t remember their names.”

“They dead, names ain’t important. But do you know who they were, to you that is?”

“They were my friend’s family.”

“The friend you call Paschal Girard, yes. That was his cousin and his cousin’s wife and daughter.”

The friend you call
…“Did he have another name?” I asked.

“Sometimes he called himself David. No last name. I believe that had been his given name, but this was something he figured out only a long time after. After the war, after he was sent down to niggertown.”

“Sent where?”

“That’s how he said it.
To niggertown
. No one else I knew called it that, but he did.”

“Sent down by whom?”

Now he
did
look nervous, but only briefly. Homer got up and left us, looking back at me through the closing door before shutting it.

“I come here to tell you truth, not to make trouble. I come because you and your husband have done a good thing, a godly thing, and because I know that you been wanting to know about your friend. I come here only to help you, and I reckon I won’t have no other good time to do it except now.”

I felt cold of a sudden, and he saw it. He took up a green blanket from the corner and laid it over me daintily, not wanting to touch me. Not wanting to be too familiar.

“Go on then. You can’t make trouble in telling me about Paschal.” And now,
David
.

“Not so sure about that, but I already got a foot in, might as well put in the other.” He settled back down in his chair. “When he said,
sent down to niggertown,
what he meant was that he had been sent down by you. You and your friends, the priest and the dwarf. And please believe me, Mrs. Hood, it ain’t easy for me to tell you this, now that your friends have done for us what they done. They’re saving our lives, no mistake. But Homer told me about how you wanted to know about your friend, so there it is.”

“I sent him to
niggertown
? What does that even mean? And how could I have possibly had the power to send him anywhere? If you knew Paschal, as you say, you know that very few people sent him anywhere he didn’t already want to go.”

“That’s true, that’s true, he was a willful man. But you got to see, a man like that is a complicated creature. He ain’t like you and me, we know who we are just by looking at ourselves in the mirror. But more than that, we know who our people are, who we come from and where we come from. But a man like that Paschal, he don’t know none of that, the mirror don’t tell him nothing and there ain’t no family for him to ask.”

I closed my eyes and shivered, pulling the covers up. I must have lost some blood, I felt clammy and nauseous. I knew what he would say next.

“So you get your family where you can when you a man like that, and I reckon you were his family. You and the priest and the dwarf. It sure as hell weren’t his cousin, he barely knew him and that family until the end, and then he died.”

“And we were always his family.”

He nodded his head.

“True, true, but families change. They go cold and hot, you know what I mean, you don’t always feel the same way about them, sometimes you don’t always treat them right. You just hope and pray you got enough time to make it right in the end.”

I was losing my patience. I wanted to hear his verdict, hear the recitation of my crimes. I didn’t need to hear his fuzzy-headed wisdom, not right then. That’s what I thought of it right then,
fuzzy-headed wisdom,
but I knew he was right. I was impatient to know how right.

“And our family?”

“All I can say is what Paschal said to me, and I only knew him as a man who came around the neighborhood every so often, always wanted to talk.”

“Say it!”
I screeched, and he flinched. Homer began to come back into the room, I could see his face in the doorway curious and scared, but when he saw me he backed out.

“He said y’all would have nothing to do with him. After the war. When no one wanted to have anything to do with a nigger no more, the white Creoles especially, who were our kin but tossed us out. You know what I’m talking about. When the
américains
took over. To them we were nothing but niggers, even Paschal. And y’all, you believed them. They had the power, see. You know this.”

I would not be accused of crimes I didn’t commit.

“I
never
cast Paschal out, never thought of him like that.”

Mr. Plessy closed his eyes for a few seconds and then opened them.

“You didn’t invite him to play piano at your wedding.”

What?
That was so long ago. An oversight, I almost said, and then I realized how much worse that would sound. My friend, the oversight.

“He didn’t even bother to come to our wedding.”

“He said he wasn’t invited.”

“No one was invited. They just came.”

“All I know is, and this is what he said,
I knew then she didn’t want me around anymore, when she kept me from touching her piano on her wedding day.
That’s what he said.”

“Well, I never saw him after that, or not very often. Where was
he
?”

“Did you go to see him? Did you invite him in?”

He was right. I had to quit arguing, but I couldn’t. I looked for any opening, any glimmer of light.

“He was busy with his real family.”

“You didn’t know that, ma’am, and anyway he weren’t very busy with them. They didn’t know him, and he didn’t know them. Sister Mary Thérèse thought it would help him to find out who his cousin was, but it wasn’t nothing like that. It wasn’t good, he got hisself in trouble in that neighborhood. He was going to take them out of the city this summer, to Pass Christian, but then he died. And then they died. And that was the end.”

I had begun to cry without noticing. I felt the tears on my chin and wiped at them. Mr. Plessy looked at me steady, impassively, and for the first time I had the feeling that he was angry. Anger came up in his eyes, flared his nostrils.

“The dwarf and the priest, they didn’t want him around much either. The dwarf wouldn’t give him a job, even when Paschal begged. Said it weren’t no life for him, but Paschal told me he’d have taken any life from Rintrah, just to be around him. And the priest, well, the priest wouldn’t take his confession. Said he didn’t want to know Paschal’s sins, said there were negro priests who would be better to hear them. And when a man says to another man that he won’t listen to his sins, priest or not, he means that he doesn’t care.”