A Separate Country (49 page)

“I wouldn’t call him a friend.”

“Acquaintance.”

“Well, he’s a little more than that, no? If he sent you here, you must have suspected that, mmm? I would have thought he’d have sent a man, more, mmm,
capable
to have done with me, but my luck is still holding. And shit, turn the hell around already.”

I did, and there was Sebastien Lemerle just as Hood had described him. Shiny and black hair, but perhaps less of it than I’d imagined. Behind him, standing in the doorway to the rest of the house, I saw a tiny, sweet-faced colored woman in a tignon, frowning at me before flouncing back into the house.

Lemerle stood straight and lean and stared at me. He wore a pair of black trousers cut off at the knees and nothing else. He was brown like an Indian, sinewy and scarred. His chest had scars that looked like the work of a large animal. He glided past me to the pot, pistol raised again and cocked. He stirred it, tasted it, put it back on the stove and closed the damper, all the while keeping the pistol pointed dead level at my forehead. When he turned back around, he was smiling.

“And where’s your weapon, anyway?”

I turned and nodded my head off toward my horse, which was happily grazing the brush and pulling out great mouthfuls of vetch, and at the old rifle in its holster swinging crazily and seeming a thousand miles away.

“That rifle over there? That’s what you brought? I ain’t a goddamn possum, Mr. Eli Griffin. This ain’t hunting.”

“Didn’t come to hunt you.” I tried to make my breath come slower, deeper. I heard ringing in my ears. My stomach was taking to sick. Even with the pistol at his side, hanging from his finger casual and loose like a jug of liquor, I knew this was a dangerous man.

“Well, that’s a very good thing, since you’re so awful bad at it. Don’t ever leave your weapon, even if it is a big old rifle that ain’t worth a damn when a man’s got a pistol dropped on you. Shit, I could be covering you with a goddamn leather punch and you’d still be in trouble at the moment.”

He looked at me thoughtfully, as if I were an amusing puzzle, a riddle he could have some fun solving.

“He didn’t send you to kill me, did he?”

“No.”

“Because if he had, he’d have sent the dwarf. Or the dwarf would have sent someone.” He leaned back against the gunwale of a busted-up pirogue, good for nothing but stove kindling now.

“Rintrah.”

“I know that demon’s name.”

Why did I smile right then? I think it was the idea of the Devil calling someone else a demon, like it was an insult. Hood’s writing, and Rintrah’s raging, had convinced me that the man Sebastien Lemerle was not human, and it had become a matter of faith with me that I would find him out in that swamp prancing about on goat’s legs wielding Death’s own scythe.

There is not anything colder than the barrel of a pistol pressed hard between the eyes. Nothing in the ice factory is that cold, not even the great pipes clad in ice. I should not have smiled. I went cross-eyed and stared at the long barrel, pitted here and there from the forging. I vowed to play this like poker from here on, to put on my grifter’s face for the duration, assuming he didn’t put me down right then.

“Is there something funny?”

“No, Mr. Lemerle.”

“You smile when I say Rintrah King is a demon. Is he not?”

Testing me. Wanting to see if I was a man who could be frightened into disloyalty. Someone to despise.

“No, he’s not.”

“He’s your friend.”

“Not a friend. But not a demon either.”

“I was hasty, then?”

I didn’t answer, just shrugged my shoulders and looked off toward the stove, where the fish was still steaming, as if I didn’t care what he did with that pistol. He lowered it again, and bent low before me, sweeping his free arm back behind him. A bow.

“My apologies, I was hasty. He’s not a demon, just a criminal who poisons my people with his cheap liquor and takes life without respect, for whom killing is a business expense paid to brutal thugs.”

I struggled mightily against the smile, and this time I won.

“I’m sorry, I thought that killing was
your
business, Mr. Lemerle.”

“It was never business.”

“And what was it?”

“It was what I am. There is a difference. It is also my art. And when you have lived a life knowing that God has cursed you with only one talent, and that you are less than nothing without it, and that this talent is repulsive and destructive and ensures your entrance to Hell, then you can laugh at me. But I suspect you do not have this problem.”

He walked over to a seat carved from a cypress stump and motioned for me to come sit by him. At his feet, on the ground wet with leaf mold, as if I were a pilgrim come to his shrine for a blessing. I had no plan anymore. The plan I’d devised on the long ride had been naïve, vain, corrupted by anger. I should have abided by Hood’s wishes, come into Lemerle’s camp with the respect he’d intended for me to show, carrying the words from Hood with honesty. Instead, he’d smelled the conflict on me, the deception, and now I had sat in a clearing in Terrebonne Parish, far from the city, far from any settlement even, where a man with a pistol whose
art
was killing stared at me, still distrustful. I wished I’d at least told M. where I was going.

“Now. Why are you here?”

And so began the strangest day of my life.

I told him the truth, as well as I could, leaving out the fact that Hood had died. I don’t know the reason. I reckon it was the old grifter’s instinct, to always hold something back, that kept me from telling him the story of Hood’s death. I wouldn’t lie to him if asked, I just didn’t want to volunteer it.

“He wrote a book, you say. And he wants me to read it?”

“Yes.”

“What’s it about?”

“Him, mostly. Also his family.”

“Sounds like torture.”

“You’re in it too.”

“Ah, the
whole
family of the great Hood. His bastard son too!”

“I’ve read the book, and I’m fair sure he doesn’t think of you as a son.”

“Don’t be smart.”

We were eating bowls of his fish stew, which had smelled better in the pot than it tasted. No spices. Lemerle was on his third bowl, and every once in a while he paused to ladle out some for the children who came up by ones and twos. They were beautiful young things, the boys and the girls, delicate curls drifting down the sides of their faces and across their backs. Some had light brown irises, some of them had green. The children each received their bowl with thanks in cupped hands, and walked off slowly not spilling a drop. The oldest’s bowl contained a fish head and he seemed particularly grateful for it, lording it over the others while the fish stared up at him, white-eyed. They looked at me straight, unafraid, even the littlest, who was naked. Their skin was golden and shining in the heat.

“But, I reckon he decided he had something he had to say to you, that he had some responsibility to you,” I said. “I don’t know, most of the time I don’t understand the man.”

“Why would I want to read about that war again?”

I hadn’t been clear. “It’s not a war book.”

That caught his attention. He wiped the face of his littlest girl, who was dressed in a cotton sack dress dyed blue and carried a small colored doll made from straw and tiny buttons.

“Then what is it?”

“It’s about what happened since then.”

“Since then.”

“In New Orleans.”

“Ahhh.”

He shooed the children and put aside his stew. He had become grudgingly hospitable, even a little warm, since we’d begun our meal, but now that it was over he brought the pistol back to his lap.

“You had better explain. Quick now.”

I told him that Hood had been writing about his life since the war, about him and Anna Marie and their children, their friends, his failures, and finally his happiness in the ruin of that godforsaken house on Third Street. He asked me why Hood would write such a thing, and I said I didn’t know, but Hood assumed that Sebastien would understand, and I guessed that was why I’d been sent to see him.

“Who else does he write about?”

“His friends. People he knew.”

“
Which
people?
”

“Rintrah, General Early, General Beauregard, his business partners, Mr. Plessy.”

“Don’t be coy.”

“You.”

“Yes.”

“Father Michel.”

His face softened and he smiled, petting the revolver gently.

“How is Father Mike?”

He asked this question as if he’d known the man, as if he had fond feelings for him. And I suppose he did, since Father Mike had saved him from murder by Hood, but even then he seemed more than just passingly familiar with Father Mike. As if he’d known him before that day in the swamp when the two killers had been separated by the great priest bear, perhaps the only human alive who could have made either of them afraid. Had Hood known this, had he suspected that Sebastien and Father Mike were known to each other? He had not, I had read his pages too many times to doubt it.

Now there were two deaths I held back from Sebastien, and I reckoned that was two too many at that point.

“Father Mike is dead.”

He took this calm and quiet. Then his eyes closed hard, and the blood drained from his temples. He pulled himself in tight, grasped his hands in front of him, in his lap, and bent over as if praying. When he sat back up again and opened his eyes, he looked around him as if he were seeing everything anew.

“Did they catch the killer? The murderer?”

“What makes you think he was murdered? I didn’t say nothing about that.”

He was a very fast man, though he always seemed to have barely moved. He had been sitting across from me, contained, and then he was standing in front of me with his fingers pinned around my neck. I tried to fight him off but I was soon swooning, the swamp began to darken before my eyes, and my arms became dull and heavy. I slumped to the ground, and when he finally released my neck the blood ran hot into my head. I thought my eyes would explode.

When I looked up he was sitting back on his stump, as if nothing had happened.

“We are at a crucial moment, Eli Griffin, and so you’re going to have to make some important decisions. Are you going to go it straight and honest, or are you going to play with Sebastien until he tires and feeds you to the alligators? I am trying to be as reasonable as I can. But what you are talking about now is obviously beyond your understanding. You’re either going to answer my questions straight, tell me what you know, cracker boy, or you’re not going to live much longer. Remember my art.”

I understood.

“So, did they find his murderer?”

“No. And I just want to explain, Mr. Lemerle, that I didn’t…”

“Quiet now.”

I was quiet.

“When?”

“The lottery. At the lottery, the big drawing last fall.”

He nodded his head, as if murdering the big priest at the lottery had been one of just a few possibilities, as if he, Sebastien, had already worked out those possibilities. I was very scared then, and I became convinced I would die. Soon enough I took comfort from knowing that I would die soon, and from knowing who would do the killing. He was right, I didn’t understand what we were talking about anymore, and I didn’t understand the man in front of me. Had he planned the murder of the priest? I nearly ran for my rifle.

“Who does Hood think did the killing?”

“He thought Father Mike ran away. He didn’t know that he’s dead.”

Sebastien looked at me queerly.

“Why would you know and not tell Hood? Why would Hood not know?”

I struggled to answer, but before I could get a word out he crossed his arms and leaned back, frowning at me. The pistol remained in his lap, the fish stew in my bowl had developed a thick skin. I put it aside.

“I understand why Hood doesn’t know,” he said.

I watched him.

“Hood is dead, too, isn’t he?”

I nodded.

“And you just found out about Father Mike.”

I nodded again.

“Hood was not murdered.”

I got my words back, the flush had gone down out of my face.

“He died of yellow jack not long ago. Him and his wife and his daughter.”

“Which daughter?”

“Lydia.”

“A beautiful girl. How tragic.”

He seemed truly saddened by that news, and this made me angry. It gave me life.

“How would you know about Lydia, or any of the other Hoods anyhow?”

He leaned forward and I could smell the onion and mullet on his breath.

“General John Bell Hood has been my special subject of study for many, many years. Of course I know who his children are. I could draw them each for you. I could tell you what they like to eat, and when they go to sleep. I can tell you what time that house used to go dark and what time they fired the cookstove in the morning.”

“You been studying him since the Indians, I guess.”

“He writes about the Comanche? Devil! But you’re a smart boy.”

He looked into my eyes, his were brown flecked with black and gray. Looking to see if I was lying. Again he lowered the weapon, this time sticking it in his pocket. At that moment I heard the children again, playing over on the far side of the clearing. The woods were clear and sweet and deep and full of color. I didn’t need to piss so bad anymore. I slid over to another stump braced by roots and sat down. He crouched on his haunches and poked at the wood in the stove. It was a long time before he spoke, so long I watched a brown spider lower itself from the overhang of his house to the ground and haul itself back up again.

His woman came out of the house and smiled sweetly at me, though I could see in her eyes the distaste sliding by. She called out in French, and the children came running. Narrow and sharp faces like Lemerle’s. Was the silent and malevolent colored woman his wife?

He introduced the woman as Danielle. She said nothing, just backed up slowly and took a seat behind me, next to an old live oak. I could hear her clicking her tongue. I became comfortable there. It was nice out in the country, I’d forgotten what it was like. It was not much like the rocky hills of Middle Tennessee, but it was quiet and the sun filtered down through the green, and I was swaddled in the warmth of sweet air. Their house, I could see, rambled on into the woods beyond my vision, one room after another, some smashed together, others piled atop the others. Everything was angled, interrupted, and covered in tin. Vines slithered through windows and behind the tin, framing the house in the green and yellow. Hundreds of goosenecked and deformed gourds hung off the house. The vines looked strong, like I could climb them.