A Separate Country (40 page)

When I was done, Rintrah had his head cocked back on his neck much like Hood liked to do. He was staring unblinking at the ceiling.

“So. Sebastien Lemerle.” His voice was low and dead.

“Yes. I should start looking for him real soon, I think.”

Rintrah jumped up and began to pace. He grabbed his hair in his big fists and pulled at it, twisted it. Something between a groan and a growl escaped from the back of his throat.

“And then we kill him.”

“That’s not the plan.”

He rolled his eyes. “Well, of
course
we will seek his considered judgment on the literary and spiritual merits of the manuscript. And after that we will kill him. You keep your word, and I finish my own business. Right neat and tidy, I say.”

“Why would I go and do that? I don’t want any part of no killing, not anymore.”

He stopped, goggle-eyed, like I had just admitted I thought the world was flat and that I intended to jump off the edge on my invisible horse.

“You would do this because this man”—he spit again—“this man killed Paschal, and without Paschal there would have been no priest to save you from the Calaboose, and no Rintrah to take care of you and get you a job and keep your ass from getting into trouble. This city would have killed you long ago without me. You’ll do it because you owe me. And if Hood was at all honest in that damned book about what Sebastien was to him, you’ll know that you ought to do it for Hood too.”

I was fairly certain Hood had not meant for me to kill this Sebastien Lemerle. I stood up, towering over the little man. I was getting tired of being ordered around, and I was about to tell him this, though I knew it would earn me a certain beating by one of his black-bearded associates. But then I thought,
What else do I have to do?
I worked in a factory slicing ice. Chasing a villain was bound to be more fun. If avenging the death of this Paschal would relieve some burden, either Rintrah’s or Hood’s, maybe I was willing. There was something I didn’t understand though.

“Why now? Why didn’t you go kill him before, if it was so important?”

Rintrah had already begun walking for the door, preoccupied and mumbling to himself. He stopped.

“Because John Hood told us Sebastien the Crow was dead. He said he killed him himself.” He remembered the coat I’d given him, took it off, folded it neatly, and placed it on his chair. “It’s a puzzle,” he finally said. “The truth is, I’m not sure I trust any of you sumbitches.”

And with that, Rintrah put his old black bowler back on his head and walked into the sunshine.

The job of finding Sebastien Lemerle, the hard job, I reckoned, fell to me. I objected since, hell, that had been the thing I wanted Rintrah to help me on. If he, the
master
of the underworld, couldn’t find him, how could I?

“Well, of course I could find out where he’s at, now that I know he alive,” Rintrah said one day while loading up his fruit, on his way out to survey his domain. “But if I were to make the inquiries, or one of my known associates, word would get back to the Crow and he’d flee. Escape. Run terrified, soiling his britches. And we can’t have that, see? We need to keep him right where he’s at, wherever the hell that is, probably in a pirogue swamped in some fucking lost bayou. If he thinks Rintrah King is after him, there is no chance he will stay put. Hell, he might kill his ownself in self-defense.”

He tossed me an artichoke he’d got off one of the arab boats, and I cursed him when it sunk its teeth into my palm. He laughed. I thought he might be overestimating his reputation, but I kept quiet.

“You, on the other hand,” he continued, showing me how to rip off the flesh of the artichoke and suck it good through my teeth, “you are not one of my known associates. Instead you are an unknown young buck, obviously a country boy and probably an idjit, a God-eater who
willingly
goes to see nuns to take instruction, a callow, fearful, and no doubt harmless git that no one will bother warning Lemerle about. Hell, you might be awanting to sell him some ice subscriptions for all anyone knows. No, you’re perfect for the job. Now get to it.”

He took the artichoke from me just as I was getting the better of the infernal fruit. He pointed to the door.

*   *   *

Rintrah hauled me in regularly, dragged behind two big men who never spoke but only grunted in some language the two of them understood but that sounded like what cave paintings might sound like.
Where’s Sebastien?
And each time I had to say,
I don’t know
.

And I didn’t know. It hadn’t been hard to find his last house, just outside the Quarter in that negro section they called Treme, on a street named Marais. He’d had several houses during the last ten years, I found out from files at the Cabildo, what they called town hall down here. Always got to be different, these people. I found out each of the houses was smaller than the last, and each street a little more ragged than the last. Finally, when I found the Treme cottage, I watched the entrance from the porch of an abandoned house across the street, rocking in an old gray chair as if I belonged. No one came out, no movement, and no lights. After a couple hours, I crossed the street.

The door was unlocked and I walked in, closing the door behind me. The place was an old cottage with four rooms, each opening onto the other. It was rustic, no doubt about that. The air was stale, trapped between the rough-hewn cypress planks in the floor and the dark overhead beams. But in between, on well-kept whitewashed plaster, hung some landscapes in oil and half a dozen silhouettes of a rat-faced family.
That’s his, I’m sure
. On an unfinished cedar side table lay a fine lace cloth, and on that a slightly tarnished silver snuffbox. Other than those objects, there was nothing else in the house: no beds, no linens, no pots in the kitchen, no food. He had once had money, that was clear, but here he’d been poor. And now he was gone.

The man at the Cabildo, ink splotted below his eyes like blue freckles, said he had no idea where Sebastien Lemerle had gone, it wasn’t his job to keep track of every person, just every property. There had been no sale, Sebastien Lemerle still owned the little cottage in Treme. If there was a sale, he’d let me know, he said. I’m sure you will, I said.

I was quite sick of arguing with Rintrah, who I had once counted as a friend. Now he was the man muscling me to do his work for him. If I was going to go back to my quiet job at the factory, I was going to need to find this Sebastien maniac and also figure out what the hell to do with this book Hood had given me. I began to sit around the old Creole cafés and saloons, hoping for someone to mention Sebastien’s name, but it never happened. I asked bartenders if they knew him, and if they did they wouldn’t say, but they most always kicked me out right about then.

There wasn’t more to do but keep asking around, so I did. And though I had no success flushing out Lemerle, I had better luck with a separate set of inquiries I began to make secret, under the nose of my all-knowing partner.

I had by then read both manuscripts straight through maybe a half-dozen times, and with each reading any hope I had that the two sets of writings would work together to explain all the mysteries, well, that hope disappeared. They didn’t fit with each other, they didn’t complete each other. Whether this was true of their marriage I can’t ever know, since I wasn’t there to observe every little moment between them, every touching, every glance. They may have fit like a puzzle in life, but the written record was missing a whole lot of pieces, words, thoughts, explanations.

The only mystery that really still mattered, though, because a man’s life would likely soon be taken because of it, was the mystery of Paschal. He hung over everything that had happened and would happen, as if he were secretly conducting things even now, in death.

I read about him, and I notice things. He is absent for a very long time, and then he suddenly appears: at an orphanage, in a swamp, at a ball, in an attic. Everyone who knew him professes their eternal love for him and a certain marveled gratitude for his friendship, as if he were not entirely of this world and they were all better for it. Father Mike, Anna Marie, Rintrah. They talked about Paschal as if he had changed their lives, as if they were lost without him. Even Hood himself, who knew Paschal only as another nigger off to get lynched and then as the breathing corpse in the attic, even
Hood
swore up and down his life was changed at the lifeless feet of Paschal of the Attic.

And yet.
And yet
.

And yet where was everyone? Why was Paschal at the ball alone? Even with the Hoods at the ball, even at Anna Marie’s invitation, he was alone. Unapproachable, untouchable. Where is he during the courtship of the Hoods, and during the ten years since? Where are Rintrah’s stories of drinking and gambling with Paschal, of going to the club to hear Paschal on the piano ragging away? I had never heard him tell any such story about Paschal, or any story at all about the man that wasn’t in fact a story of the child Paschal. Rintrah would tell stories in great detail about a steak he’d had at Arnaud’s, or a madam he’d beat at chess in 1867, but never a story about Paschal the man, his friend. Father Mike had never said a word about him, either, except to say that he’d been the most beautiful dancer he’d ever seen, and that it was Paschal who really should have been the priest, that he would have brought far more souls into the Church than the great belligerent bear Father Mike had become, suitable only for lifting things and long hours at the altar rail praying for forgiveness.
Paschal had grace,
Father Mike used to say.

Paschal was also a negro, the whitest of negroes but still a negro. They rarely mentioned
that,
but I reckoned it was the place to start.

I went back down to Treme, looking for anyone who might have known Paschal recently. In the dirt streets of the neighborhood, ditched but unguttered, colored women walked home with baskets of food and wearing the tignon on their heads, indigo and yellow and green and red and every other color I had no words to describe. Carts passed by, the horses old and swaybacked but the carts painted and greased and running silent below their cargoes of fabrics and lumber and sugarcane. The cottages here were small, but built on thick posts and beams and painted as if it were always Carnival. There was an apothecary’s shop, a butcher, a bank. Churches everywhere, small huts and steepled palaces, Catholics and Baptists and Methodists all squeezed in. I saw a man selling fish on Marais Street. He’d iced the redfish and bull cats down, and I nearly told him I’d made that ice but thought better of it, afraid he’d think me crazed and have me run out of the neighborhood. I meandered on, past Lemerle’s old house, until I’d gone across the street and around a corner, where I surprised a gang of cats that scattered grudgingly and with hate in their eyes. Down two houses an old man on his porch sat watching me and smiling.

“Lost.” It sounded like a question.

“Oh, nah, just looking round a bit,” I said.

His face cracked open like a rock split in the heat, a thousand tiny cracks that slipped together as one big grin.

“No, believe me, you lost. But I’ll hep you find your way home again. You don’t want no trouble, now, I’m sure.”

“No.”

He was very tall, taller than me, and so dark his airy gray hair seemed lit from inside. His eyes smiled, wrinkled permanently that way, and he wore denim overalls faded to nearly the color of the sky, white at the knees. He waved me up and onto a stool beside him. He had been peeling shrimps from a pail containing a little more of my ice, no doubt bought over on Marais Street at the fish cart.

“Only got shrimps for me and the wife, sorry to say.”

“I ain’t hungry, thank you.”

“At all?”

“No.”

“So, you saying that if I bulled them shrimps up right now, you ain’t gone to eat one?”

“Not if there was only enough for you and your wife.”

“Didn’t say
that
. Said they were
for
me and the wife, meaning not for wandering white men lost on their way to the brothel. But now that I see you up close rycheer, I say you ain’t one of them. You just lost, any count.”

We were quiet for a moment, only the sound of the shells snicking into his trash bucket. I looked in and a few dozen heads stared back at me attached to white shells, ghosts of their former hosts.

“I’d give you a shrimp, it come to that.”

“And I weren’t lying when I said I weren’t hungry.”

“All right.”

He went silent again, but he looked straight at me, expecting something. His eyes had yellowed. I decided to start with this old man.

“Are you from here?” Sliding into the questions, make it sound like just talk.

“Do you mean, am I a Louisiana nigger? A New Orleans nigger? No, I ain’t. I am a Mississippi country negro and until the war I had me a nice little place near Vicksburg, cotton, hogs, and vegetables. I was a free negro like my daddy, case you wondering. Well, Vicksburg weren’t no place for a negro, free or no, come the war, so we come on down to hide round here, with all the rest of the free negroes, except they all French and they polish their nails. The jens culyoor, it’s French, you look it up. I build houses now, and the children, they had been good hardworking and churching country negroes, but now they
Creoles,
and they wear funny hats and pray up there with the Catholics. No, say, I am
not
from here.”

“I see, well…”

“But I got eyes, I see good. What you want to know?”

He had stopped peeling shrimp. He wanted to talk, I could tell, he wanted to show me how much he knew, how nothing got by him. That’s how folks get around strangers sometimes, they want to let you know this here’s their territory, you just the smallest speck of it. I could be that speck.

“Did you ever know a man named Paschal Girard?”

“Colored?”

Could I be that lucky? I prayed I was.

“Yes, yes!”

“No. Not a white one either. Don’t know any Girards, truth is.”

I rubbed my eyes, got some dirt in them, rubbed them some more, and finally had to wipe the tears from my face. The old man handed me his handkerchief, but I waved him away. This was hard work, no doubt.