A Separate Country (4 page)

Lydia kept shaking her head and sliding toward her father, until finally Hood got to his feet and walked over to take her hand. The woman hid the bundle in the folds of her umbrella before Hood could see.

At the house, the family of Anna Marie gaggled on the front lawn. There were no drinks, no food, and no one went into the house. It had been contaminated by disease, and in the custom of some New Orleanians, it was thought that it was courting death to enter a yellow-jack house so soon. Hood and Lydia received the mourners under the oaks, shin-deep in the dark, green ripples of their uncut lawn. When they moved, tiny beetles, leafhoppers, and spittlebugs flew off like spray in their wake. I stayed back, leaning against the edge of the porch. My head got hot and tight, but I didn’t cry.

Not all of the mourners stayed outside. I watched that Aunt Henriette from the cemetery edge toward the sidepath until she had disappeared around the house, heading toward the back door. I followed slow and careful, and then hid behind a mulberry bush to watch her as she wrapped her face with a fine and embroidered white handkerchief, pulled the ledgers from her umbrella, crossed herself, and went into the house through the kitchen. I stayed put. If she was so on fire to give the girl those useless ledgers, and that’s what I figured her for doing, I saw no reason to stop her. When she came back out and removed the handkerchief, the ledgers were gone. Tears shined her cheeks and made her nose red. She kneeled right there on the step and prayed. Grief is a kind of craziness, and I knew better than to interrupt.

Now, a month later, I stood in Lydia’s room, which had been stripped and mopped and emptied. I had to find that bundle. I had come to think that it weren’t just numbers in those books. If I was going to do Hood’s bidding, I wanted to know it all, every secret, whether Hood knew them or not. Especially if Hood didn’t know them. I wouldn’t mind knowing more than him for once.

The ledgers were easy enough to find, hidden under a small pile of scarves in the bottom of Lydia’s wardrobe. There was a note tucked into the top ledger:

Cousin,

Please be sure Lydia receives these. She will want to read them someday. John must not know about them, for obvious reasons.

A.M.

That night I finished reading Hood’s book and I began on Anna Marie’s notebooks. Two nights without sleep. When I had finished, there was nothing left to do but begin the job Hood had set out for me, or be a coward. A traitor, to Hood, to Anna Marie, and to any hope that this life isn’t just a crazy pile of accidents. I slept all the next day.

From the Secret Memoir of John Bell Hood,
Written Between September 1878 and August 1879

I
came to New Orleans with $10,000 in my pocket. In a small valise, to be absolutely truthful. This was money borrowed from my family’s acquaintances back in Kentucky. I had once dismissed Kentuckians as ditherers and cowards unwilling to sacrifice even a drop of blood or a pound of coin to protect the homeland. I had fought for Texas, instead.
Texas, where the Comanche maimed me
. After the war, I went to Kentucky as a pariah Confederate and I begged from those same men I had once insulted and abandoned. They had the grace to forgive me. I had been another man when the war started, they said. I was now a humiliated man, a worm, albeit a worm with $10,000 in United States currency packed in a leather bag at my feet.

I remember rolling toward the train station by the lake that first time. The lake mirrored the sun, fracturing it into an infinitude of tiny fires, flaring and extinguishing while I held my breath. Not having been to New Orleans, and a little travel weary besides, I mistook it for the river. An old, hairless man in black slept on the seat across from me. When I said to myself,
The river is worth the trip,
the man snorted and wiped his eyes with the heels of his hands as a child might.

“Ain’t the river, General Hood. You’ll know the river when you smell it.”

“How do you know my name?”

“Your name? Everyone knows your name. I think what you mean is, How do I know your
face
?”

He unwound and stretched before sitting up straight. He was old, but his arms were tight coils of tendons, a workingman’s arms. He was brown, sun-brown, from the crown of his freckled head to the ankles that emerged sockless when he stretched his legs. He was tall, and I had to look up at him.

“Yes, my face. How do you know it? Who are you?”

“I am merely an old fisherman,
un pescador
. But I hear things, and I see things, and they tell me you are you.”

Ungodly bastard. I had heard about the mystical blasphemies popular among the Louisiana negroes, but had not known that white men indulged in them as well. He was Spanish, I assumed, and I decided that this explained his foolishness.

“Please spare me your superstitions.”

“Of course, General. But are you sure you would not like me to read your hand? Not the lame one, of course. Perhaps I might examine the hairs of your beard and tell your future?”

He winked at me and settled contentedly into his seat, and I knew he had been joking. I tested this by smiling, and he smiled back. Let it be said now: John Bell Hood knows a joke and he can laugh too.

“How do you know my name, then?”

“The conductor is my friend. He sat me with you because he knew I wouldn’t bother you with talk. He likes you, I assume. Once he told me your name, I knew it was true. Your face has been in the papers many times, General, and it’s not a face to forget. You’ve got that wood leg too.”

I had removed my leg and tucked it under my seat beside the satchel.

“I understand,” I said. “Thank you for correcting me about the river.”

A small cloud of smoke from the engine floated through our window and he waved it from his face.

“Well, it wouldn’t be right to let a general loose in the city without giving him a bearing. Even Orpheus knew his way around. A little guidance is the last I can give you.”

At first I thought he’d said
least,
but I realized soon that he’d said
last
. I felt that familiar dread again. He looked out and spit a mouthful of soot through the window. He checked his tongue for specks, wiped his hand over his shiny brown head, and looked down at his shoes. For a moment he didn’t look at me, or anything in particular. He watched the void in front of his face, where I suppose he could see time moving past. Years into moments into eternity and back.

“We should have all had some guidance,” he said to whatever it was he watched.

“You had a son,” I said. It was obvious. I was embarrassed as soon as I said it. He’d had a son, and that son had marched under my flag. He had eaten whatever food I decided to give him, he had slept when I told him he could sleep. He had made friends, he had written letters and those letters had been carried back to the rear when I thought I could spare a messenger. Without knowing, and I would have never dared to ask, I decided he had died at Franklin, on the cold slope littered with shoes, hats, canteens, rifles, fallen osage orange trees, the bodies of other men. He was nearly to the entrenchments, nearly to a breakthrough and some kind of safety. He might have hidden in a corncrib or a smokehouse had he made it that far, but instead he fell just in front of the Union line. Perhaps he’d been close enough to be bayoneted. What had he thought of the cold in Middle Tennessee, that son of a Spaniard from south Louisiana? I hoped that he had died quick, and hadn’t shivered his life away there. At the time I wouldn’t have cared, but now I did. It shouldn’t have happened that way. I shouldn’t have ordered that charge. But I knew better, I was the Gallant Hood, and the Gallant Hood ordered a charge into near certain death for most of his army because I saw no other choice and it was good for their sense of Southern invincibility and pluck. I sent them up and laid them down before the Union’s fire like so many sheaves of wheat. All in rows. I had killed thousands of my own people because I, the Gallant Hood, had led as if battle was a bracing bit of exercise, a game. I knew this, and yet I could not admit it then.

He smiled. “Now who is the voudou witch?” He nodded his head.

“And he died.”

“Yes.”

“Under my command.”

“Sí.”

I had no children, and at that moment I could not know what pain he might have felt. I know it now, but
then
all I could think to imagine was his anger. His pain was merely an abstraction.

“Your son did not die in vain.” Such a stupid thing to say, such an arrogant, ignorant, brutal thing to say. The man took a minute to answer me.

“He died. That’s all.”

I thank God I had the sense not to say anything then.

We sat silent during the last few minutes of the ride, each of us swaying together as the train turned and wobbled and banked. I had some trouble staying upright without the leg, so I bent over to strap it on. I could feel him watching me.

“You’ve made your sacrifice, General.”

I didn’t say anything.

“May I tell you something?”

I nodded my head while crouched over my leg. I stayed like that, listening for him.

“I won’t be the only one who will recognize you. You are not easy to miss. You would be better off looking us all in the eye. If you are ashamed, you will not last.”

I sat up. “I am not ashamed.”

“Ah, my mistake. I assumed.”

He had no bags. I watched him stand at the end of the platform, watching the red sun bleed into the horizon. Meanwhile porters scurried to load my great, varnished, ironbound trunks onto the back of a four-in-hand. When he walked over to the stairs and stepped down from the platform, he looked over at me and scanned me from head to toe, as if looking for something. Or judging me. I watched him walk, on fisherman’s legs bow-legged and steady, moving fast down the Shell Road toward the city. He was soon lost in the dust clouds that kicked up in the wind that now rushed in off the lake as the sun disappeared. I never thought to offer him a ride. When my coach passed him on the way into town from the station, he had stepped off the Shell Road to piss. He grinned up at me.

“Don’t look back, General!” he shouted over the clatter of the horses. He was laughing when we turned out of sight.

New Orleans was, very simply, the only Southern city that still worked, where a man might still make a dime in those years just after the war. Briefly my mind turned to the subject of money: its acquisition, cultivation, its transformative properties, its promise of freedom. I had never cared much for money before, but war had changed that. Forgive the young general, forgive me.

I can remember what I thought standing for the first time in the St. Louis Hotel, watching the traders and fixers mingling in the red and alabaster of the lobby, sharing their whiskey and passing around bills of sale. They were smooth-faced and tailored. Their shoes glowed. They moved lightly between couch and chair and bar. I stood on the precipice, a scarecrow, a lump of earth, a pile of broken things, and watched them flow and slip around each other like dancers. They were full of grace, the earthly kind, and I was full of heaviness. No one acknowledged me.
The old man was wrong about that,
I thought then, but now I knew he had been right: I was seen, recognized, and ignored. Negro waiters, wrapped in bright white coats and bearing trays of glasses and tobacco, drifted between knots of men who honked and brayed at each other in pleasure. The waiters bowed and shuffled just as they would have before the war. What had changed? Men laughed, they shook hands. The mirrors were polished, the landscapes framed in bright gold and hung straight. The whole place was
easy,
unperturbed, secure. In that one spot, in that one city in that singular state far from my enemies, this was how things had been, how they were, and how they always would be. I realized for the first time that the war had not been all-consuming. It had consumed me, but not these men whose suits were not pulling apart at the seams and whose legs did not thump and scrape across the gleaming tile. There had been men who had flourished while Chickamauga raged, men who had gone home to their wives and concubines while other men dragged their squadmates off the field at Little Round Top and laid them in bloody piles. I was not angry to realize this, though it was a shock even so. I became confident and certain in this knowledge. I became gleeful at the thought:
These men owe me
. My cause was right, and my cause was not just money but compensation.
Look at my leg,
I thought, pushing through a boisterous group of Creole cotton men and planters in gold cravats.
Who will bid on my leg?

The city embarrassed me, or I was embarrassed for the city, one or the other. Blacklegs walked the streets like kings, arms thrown over the shoulders of the innocent, hands on the asses of whores. The whores dressed better and spoke more eloquently than the dark-haired and pious wives who spent their days fumbling with beads, their heads wreathed in cloying smoke. Stray cotton bolls, lifted across the quay on light wind, drifted against walls and collected in doorways like old, peppery snow that no one bothered to remove. The Italians lived like dogs in their secret courtyards redolent of the old vegetables and shrimp shells that brewed in their stews. In came the innocent and hopeful, and out went the dead. It was an indecent town.

Nothing mattered but the money. Oh Lord! How could there be so much money? It floated down the river, funneled from the mountaintops to the valleys to the fields to the docks, and on to the hive of cotton offices, insurers, bankers, and saloonkeepers. The money bought sculpture and flesh, tombs and exquisite gardens laden with lemons and bananas. It bought leisure, the most important thing.

Any man with even a little wit could open an office, buy a desk, hang a sign, and accept the money as if by right. It was possible to look out the window of the office and see each person as a chit to be banked, every crowd a living body of future accrued interest, every new friend a mark to be plundered for treasure. It was not so much different from imagining men as lines on a map, every small line merging into a larger one aimed at the enemy’s lines, each man merely a walking rifle.