A Separate Country (48 page)

“Pah.”

“There is such a thing, Anna Marie.”

“Vanity it is, in my experience. Men’s
business
.”

He rolled his hat in his thick hands. It was felt, and black, and had the shape of a pie left out in the rain.

“Do you miss it? The old times? We are the only two left.”

“There are plenty left, Rintrah. Look around. Do you hear the children? There are ten now.”

“Soon to be eleven,” he said, smiling sadly.

“Yes. And then there’s John.”

“They are not mine. I do not belong to them, and they do not belong to me. It is different for me, Anna Marie. You did not answer the question, but I will. Yes, I miss those times, and I miss who we were.”

Then, at that moment, I knew why I could be happy while the house around me moldered and gathered dust. The life in the house did not molder and gather dust, it grew. I could be happy because I did not miss who I had been. I did not miss the balls and the dresses and the amusements, but most of all I did not miss the girl. I did not know the girl anymore, I had forgotten what had interested her, I could not remember how she had dressed her hair. She had become a stranger, that Anna Marie Hennen. She had been married, and she had given birth, and she had become unhappy and perhaps even mad, but that was not who she had become. She was a traitor to her class, to her
people,
and this filled her with excitement. She was her own creation, now, and if very few could see any beauty or peace in that creation, the better for her. I had become something, I was not merely created. No person had made me become this woman, and in my daydreams I imagined that John had been changed by
me,
and not the reverse. I had not been molded by my husband or anyone else. I had been changed by love, specifically the love of others, and most specifically the ability to love people I didn’t know, and the will to truly know the people I loved without reservation whatever their sins. May you discover that love yourself, Lydia.

I did not miss Anna Marie Hennen, but I did miss my friends.

“What happened to Michel, Rintrah?”

The question surprised him and he dropped his hat. He fumbled it back into his lap and closed his eyes.

“I can’t say. It is too complicated. Where is the General?”

“He’s dead.”

“The General?” Rintrah looked alarmed, as if the porch was about to collapse beneath us.

“No, Michel.”

He looked at me for a long time, straight into my eyes. He was not embarrassed to look at me so closely, as he had been for so long. And I thought to myself,
When did Rintrah get such kind eyes?

“I don’t know where he is, and so I reckon anything is possible.”

“Did he run off?”

“That is what they say.”

“And what do
you
say?”

He sighed. He looked very tired and thin, especially around his mouth, which was drawn at the edges and wrinkled.

“I say nothing. I must leave if the General isn’t returning.”

“He’ll be here sometime, don’t you run off. What happened to Michel?”

He got to his feet and pulled that awful little hat down to his ears. He looked at me as if I might break at any moment, and that he would be very sad when it happened.

“I don’t know what happened, not exactly. Not why it happened, specially. But I know he wouldn’t ever run off. And you know it too.”

“I do.”

“Tell the General I need to speak to him. I need to explain something to him, something he thinks he understands but doesn’t. Tell him to come visit at the house if he has a mind to.”

“You know he won’t.”

“Ask him anyway.”

Rintrah walked off, up Third Street toward St. Charles, and it was only then that I understood that he had walked all that way from his dark, cold house and I had never invited him in.

Eli Griffin

T
o the poorhouse.
I reckon that just after he wrote those words, he just got sick and lost his will. I know this: he never wrote another word that I know about, and certainly not anything as ridiculous as what Beauregard claimed was the man’s last request, that his surviving children be split up and sent away with the scattered members of Hood’s old Texas Brigade. Shit. But this is a matter I will take up later.

I have faithfully recorded the words of Anna Marie and General Hood here, I haven’t left a word or a letter or a period out of any of it. You will understand, then, why the end of it made me miserable. The story was only beginning, for Christ’s sake. Even I, a cracker-ass grifter and ice attendant, who had only
just
acknowledged the presence of something other than a business transaction between himself and M., my beautiful and hardmouthed Irish lass—even
I
could see that God had played an awful trick on them, that they had found some kind of secret about love just in time for death. I am not a sentimental man, but it couldn’t end there. If it ended there, shit, why should it have ever been begun? Why should anyone begin, why should anyone try to love anything, if all that’s going to happen is that you suffer, and suffer some more, and then just when you’ve come to the end of that suffering and found some peace, off with your goddamn head, off to the cemetery with you, here’s a tombstone. I was
angry
.

And because I was angry, the story did not end there.

Because I was angry, I ginned up some courage for myself and went riding on down south, into the distant swamps that bled finally into the sea just past the last hummocks of land at the bottom of the world. The old man at the tax office said Lemerle had sold his property in the city the year before and that he’d left only a brief note in the file:
Gone south
.

I lied to Rintrah. I told him I knew nothing more about Lemerle, that I still hadn’t tracked him down. Rintrah absentmindedly tossed a fat orange in his right hand, up and down, nodding his head.

“You’re either a hell of a lazy young man, an idiot, or a liar. I’ll be kind and say you’re an idiot. But you better not be an idiot much longer. Ain’t many more days left for being an idiot. You got one day, in fact. After that, I’m going to think you running a game on me. You running a game?”

“No sir.”

“Now I
know
you running a game on me, calling me sir. One day.”

He put the orange back in its crate and tipped it up on a brick so the negro ladies in their bright tignons and the bearded white Creoles in their tall black hats could get a good look. Down the street, I could see one of Rintrah’s men, a slim dandy in a sky-blue suit they called Dagger Don, watch me closely. He picked his long yellow nails with a short blade.

I began to walk off.

“So where you going today?”

“More of the same. Got one more day, right? Might get down on all fours and go sniffing out after him like a redbone.”

“Go to Hell, Eli.”

“We’ll see.”

I walked back toward the Shell Road where I could hire a horse, and prayed he wouldn’t notice when I’d disappeared from the city.

When Lemerle said he’d gone south, this turned out to mean he’d gone on down into the flat and marshy Terrebonne Parish, back off a little bayou in an Indian camp. You could tell it was an Indian camp from the little perfect hills that ringed the clearing, some of them full of dead Indians, some of them full of broken pots and oyster shells. It was a strange place to make a home, most people avoided the old Indian settlements for fear of what kind of red man’s houdou might be on it, haunting the place. I’d have thought an old Indian killer would have steered far clear, but this wasn’t the case.

It was a long ride, and as I went the road became ever more narrow and straight, and the cottonwood and live oaks and cypresses ever more stunted and twisted in the hard salt wind that stung my eyes whenever the road turned due south in the direction of the ocean. I had time to think, I had the quiet for thinking. After a couple hours I’d got so far away from the city and its noise that my ears throbbed and hummed, making noise out of nothing. Like they might fall off and die if they didn’t have something to hear. But down there in the parish, only the insects made any sort of noise, and then it was only a sort of hum, sometimes a trill. It took some time to get so I could hear the birds and the slap of a bream tail on the water, but finally I got my old country ears back, and I felt calm. Purposeful and certain. Strong. The city could never be my domain, I was weak on those streets and in the shadows of tall brick towers. But among the peepers and thrashers, the hot peaty smell of wet wood in my nose, I was a master.

I steeled myself for the mission, which had grown some since Hood had put it on me. In the saddlebag sat a copy of Hood’s manuscript, which I would show to Lemerle. I would wait for his answer to Hood’s question:
Have I cast off the Devil, am I a new man, truly?
But I had some questions of my own now. I would ask him about Paschal, the ghost who had begun to haunt me, and if I didn’t like his answers—if he dared to
lie
to me—I would take his head back to Rintrah in the other saddlebag. I would ask him about Father Mike, too, and why the priest saved his life on that day when Hood himself had ridden down into this very country and hunted Lemerle like a coon. He knew more than Hood realized, I was certain. I wanted him to tell me what he knew about Father Mike. And then, maybe I’d kill him anyway on principle, for being unfit to live as a human.

I was very certain of myself and convinced of my power to whup ass. I was convinced I could kill, though I’d never done it. I should have known better.

When I saw the break in the weeds and vines off to the right, the dark spot right there in the middle of the trees dusted white with road dirt, I knew I’d found the place. There was a post at the break, a cypress post driven hard into the ground, and from it hung a man’s black hat that had a faded band of woven honeysuckle circling it at the band, and an old gray crucifix woven from split cane leaves. At its base someone had left a small black doll in a torn calico dress, sitting up among a heap of dandelion heads. It was the kind of shrine a child might build. I thought,
They saw me coming
. I spurred my horse and tore into the brush and down the narrow path. I wanted to arrive in a clatter of hooves and shrieks. I wanted fear.

I felt foolish when I pulled up finally, a quarter mile down the path, in the middle of the clearing. Three colored and naked children played in front of a rambling barge-wood shack. They looked up for a second and then paid me no mind. I couldn’t tell whether they’d seen me coming, so that my arrival was no surprise, or whether they thought that they generally had nothing to fear from white men come whipping down their lane, rifle slung, horse sweated and angry. It was the latter, I would learn.

When I asked the oldest to go find Monsieur Lemerle, he told me he was six and didn’t know no Monseiur Lemerle, and then ignored me. He had wavy brown hair and looked nervous. He and his brothers batted around an old coon skull with long pieces of driftwood. I could see a storm rolling in off the Gulf, and had I been in the mood, I might have recorded the picturesque scene in my notebook: the white, roiling mountains of sky, the shiny and dark bodies of the negro children, the sweet yellow of dying cane in the clearing beyond.

The children had been city children, and two still wore the scuffed and laced-up boots of a city child, but they behaved as if they had never lived anywhere else and as if they had never been so happy. The coon skull was just the greatest goddamn thing that had ever come into their lives, if the expressions on their faces told the story. They were free, dirty, and ran as a pack. The boy waved beetles under the noses of his sisters, and the girls slid frogs down his shirt. These were children Paschal might have seen. He might have even known them by name, something I would never bother to do. I regret that now.

I rapped on the front door with the cane Rintrah had given me. I could hear scrabbling inside the place, but no one came to the door. Around the left side, where someone had built an improvised kitchen half open to the elements, I saw something boiling in an iron pot. Steam drifted my way, but there was no one tending it. I’d eaten nothing since the night before. The steam carried with it the trace of potatoes, onions, sassafras, and the musk of some kind of beast, fish or fowl, possibly both. It began to boil over and so I walked over to take it off the rusty old stove, giving it a stir first. I dipped the ladle in, drained it against the side, and took a bite. Then a second. It was thin soup, but once I’d got it on my tongue I had to keep eating. Mullet, I think.

“Get your own fish.”

The voice was low and crackling, and I didn’t have to hear the hammer click to know I was in some trouble.

“Just tending it, friend. Meant no harm.” I didn’t turn around. Either he was going to shoot me or reveal himself, and neither one required that I turn around. I’d rather get shot in the back of the head, I’ve always thought.

“Who are you?”

I hadn’t thought of how I would begin, and seeing as how he was the one with the gun on me, I wasn’t going to scare him into cooperating with me, either. What was I supposed to say? Better to start simple when the hammer’s cocked.

“My name is Eli Griffin, friend.”

“Oh, then, well, I didn’t know I had a friend named Eli Griffin.”

“I’m from New Orleans.”

“No,
I’m
from New Orleans, you’re an
américain
. Upcountry, I reckon.”

“We have a friend in common.”

“Seeing as how I don’t have any friends who are still alive, I’m going to call you a liar.”

“I was sent here by John Bell Hood.”

He had been scratching his finger against the butt of the pistol, but now he stopped. I knew this because as soon as I heard his voice and heard the gun cock I’d been able to hear the slightest flicker of the smallest gnat. Silence. I was standing right over the steaming pot of fish, and I thought my face would just slide off in a pool of nervous sweat. I heard the hammer click down.