A Separate Country (54 page)

Now the only person in the room who was armed was Sebastien. He pushed the oily hanks of his long black hair behind his ear and considered all of us. He lingered on me.

“I thought we would be in time to save the books, but I miscalculated. I am sorry, Eli. And I wasn’t able to track down Hector until it was too late. The fire burned very fast. I am sorry.”

He turned to Hector.

“You killed a priest. You killed a priest who saved my life. He is owed, as I’m sure you understand.”

Hector looked up at him with tired eyes. He was already dying, his skin had turned white and he was shivering. The carpet had turned red beneath him. He nodded his head and turned away from the apparition with the guns. Sebastien stepped over to him and fired one shot into his ear and Hector was still. I coughed up everything I’d eaten since the day before. There was too much blood, I had seen too much killing. It would never stop.

Sebastien had everything planned perfectly. I wonder now when he devised his plan. Was it after he left us scaling the house? Was it on our ride into town? Was it when Danielle kissed him before going inside their rambling little shack? Or had he been planning it much longer? He might have been making that plan, or something like it, since that day in Texas when he put the knife to his first Comanche. Whenever it happened, he accomplished something extraordinary that night: he stopped the bloody violent cascade of hate and violence that he and Hood had set in motion so many years ago. I remember what Hood wrote, I remembered it even clearer after it had been burned. He’d asked himself if the events of the last two years had been a result of the howl they’d let loose in that Comanche camp, whether the plague and the failures and the murders were the howl itself, which one of them would have to silence. I don’t know about that, I don’t know how God works. God is beyond my understanding, as the priests like to say. I know this: it was Sebastien and Sebastien alone who knew what his atonement would be and stood up to meet it.

He put down the little pistol of Dauphin’s and emptied the other pistol, the big pistol, of all but one round. He tossed the other bullets around the room where they rolled up under couches and rested against dusty books. He did the same with the other guns. He closed his pistol again, checked to make sure the bullet was chambered properly, and cocked the hammer.

“Now,” he said, looking at Dauphin, who had just come to his senses after his pistol-whipping. “You, Dauphin, you get up.”

“You will be found if you kill me.”

“Tell them how we know each other.”

“I’ve never met…”

“Tell them!”

Dauphin let his head slump, defeated. He mumbled.

“I will not be held responsible for this.”

“Speak.” Sebastien said it quietly, almost tenderly, all the time with the pistol drawn on the old con man, the lottery commissioner.

“I hired you to kill Rintrah and Father Michel.”

“Who else did you hire?”

“Hector, that man there.”

“And who killed Father Michel?”

“Hector.”

“And where was I?”

“I don’t know.”

“I was far, far away on a bayou, thinking I was done with killing. I was wrong about that, no?”

“Obviously.”

“I am done with it now.”

Dauphin looked elated and puzzled at the same time. Rintrah and I were still too scared of Sebastien to move.

Sebastien turned the pistol around and held it by the barrel. I held my breath.

“You invited me up here to say good-bye to my friend before he died, so”—he turned to Rintrah—“good-bye. I am truly sorry about your friends, and I hope you will someday forgive me for what I did to your friend Paschal. I must atone for that, I hope I know how. Perhaps someday Mr. Eli Griffin will tell you the whole story of Paschal and me.”

Rintrah grimaced and told him to go fuck himself, that he’d never forget him, and that he was a coward for letting Dauphin, the goddamn fop, do his killing for him. Sebastien nodded his head and turned back to Dauphin.

“So, here is the pistol, you may kill the man who would have taken your money if you’d given him the chance. Now you can finish the job. But consider this, my friend. I will be standing here, five feet from you, and if you do choose to use your one and only bullet on Rintrah, I will close those five feet and cut you from ear to ear. If Rintrah dies, you die. Very simple, yes?”

Silence in the room. No one moved.

“However, if you choose to turn your pistol on me, you will walk away.”

More silence.

“To put it more simply, I want to trade for Rintrah’s life, and I will not give you much of a choice. How much is it worth to you to kill a man who would have merely taken money from you? How much is your life worth? Now, here it is.”

He handed the pistol to Dauphin, butt first, and took one step backward. He pulled a giant knife from his coat and stood there with it at the ready.

Dauphin looked confused at first, and held the pistol like it was a turtle that had just appeared in his hand. Slowly his fingers wrapped around the butt and he held it halfway up.

“I want to ask Rintrah a question.”

“You may,” Sebastien said, watching him close.

“Was it worth it, Rintrah? Was all that money worth it? Why would you do such a thing?”

Rintrah stood stock-still off to Dauphin’s right.

“We did it for the Hoods. We’d made them poor when they should have been rich. And there’s no shame in grifting a grifter, whatever you say.”

Dauphin turned to me.

“And you? All this running around and exposing of secrets that should have been buried and left buried? Futile! Beauregard is away because he is arranging to have Hood’s book on his war experiences published, and everything else has been destroyed. Beauregard knows nothing about any of this, nor will he ever know anything about it. While you’re here, he’s sending Hood’s children, the orphans, to homes around the country. He’s splitting them up, they may never see each other again. What do you think of that? I suppose you haven’t thought of it. No, you’re standing here. You had to keep asking questions. How many people will die because of your goddamn curiosity? Why did you persist?”

I was too tired and too sad to say anything else right then.

“I did it for Hood, too.”

He turned, finally, to Sebastien.

“And why would you come back here? Why did you care about these people? You don’t care about anyone, you’re a monster. Why these people?”

Sebastien closed his eyes.

“Because Hood would have wanted it.”

The bullet made a neat hole in Sebastien’s forehead and he fell back. I caught him before he hit the floor and laid him down softly.

John Bell Hood

I
wish I had more time. I wish I had more time with her. I wish I had been good to her. I changed, we changed, the poorhouse was warm and full, full of children and talk and humility. But how will it be now, she is nearly out of her mind in the other room, and I can no longer talk to her. I change the sheets, I wipe the sweat from her brow. She holds my hand, my good hand, and that’s all we have left.

It is a cursed fate. I am cursed. The Lord works in mysterious, brutal ways. How is it that we could come to know each other again, or perhaps even for the first time, truly, and yet have only a year to live with that knowledge and to be guided by it, bound by it. Was that all there was, was that all we get in this life? Brief happiness interrupting the woe and grief? It feels this way now. I must fight the bitterness, the hate. I feel it welling up in me, I want to strike out. I want to track down Father Mike and drag him back to this city to tell me what I am to make of
this,
my love and his friend, dying with eleven children in the house. Eleven children who I watch all day walking by her door, peeking in and running off. They are quiet and dutiful and scared. What, Father Mike, does your missal have to say about this? Coward, he has run off and I shall not forgive him. He promised me he would remind me of my obligation to God, but what of God’s obligation to me? Has He none? I want Father Mike to answer that question for me.

I must reject the bitterness. I am scaring the children myself. I stomp from window to door, window to door, all day muttering to myself. I have thrown open the window so that Anna Marie might smell the jasmine and sweet olive, the old roses that have gone to rambling across the yard. When she holds my hand it is still soft, though also hot and dry now. I should put down this pen and lie beside her so that she will know she is not alone. I shall.

I left the lottery thinking we would have to move on, that I would have to pack up Anna Marie and the children and march on up to Kentucky where we could throw ourselves on the mercy of my family. Anna Marie’s family had nearly disappeared. Her father was dead, her mother lived far away around the lake, her cousins had apparently disappeared. We would farm, I knew how to farm. I could make a crop of tobacco, or corn, we could raise hogs. I thought that Anna Marie would make a good farmwife. It amused me to imagine her learning to slop hogs and prime tobacco, I saw her in her Creole best tiptoeing around the hog pen and it made me laugh. But I knew that she would adapt and flourish. She was always less of the flower than I had at first thought, not so delicate as I had imagined. I had to learn this, and I had. I have made no money, what we’ve had I’ve borrowed from my family and some of my army colleagues, and ten years ago this would have shamed me. I suppose I should still be ashamed, but I’m not. If it is for the benefit of Anna Marie and the eleven blessed children, I don’t care what it is or what it says about me. It is an odd realization, to know that the right life is one lived without concern for worldly reputation or success, one that is subordinated to anything good. And my family, my family is good.

In quiet moments, when I am not so bitter, I wish Father Mike was here so that I could tell him this. I’ve learned humility, not the worldly kind but the kind that causes a man to pale before God. That is what happened to me when I walked out of that lottery building. I fell before God and gave Him my will. And He gave me peace.

The funeral was quick. I invited almost no one. I saw Eli in the trees but I would not acknowledge him. I had only known him when Anna Marie was alive, and now that she was gone everything was new and threatening. He was a stranger now, a stranger from another place. I was overcome, obviously.

I had sent the children away, and so they didn’t see their mother laid to rest. All the children except Lydia. She had refused. She was tired, she said, and she worried about me, and when I put her on the carriage to her grandmother’s with the other children she screamed and would not quit screaming until I lifted her back down and took her inside the house.

I had no words, no tongue for speech. There is a spot on the ground next to her for me. There were no eulogies at my insistence. I wanted the funeral to be quick, for every moment that she lay between resting places was a moment of agony for me, and I thought I might be swallowed up by the hole that had been opened up between the living and the dead by my wife, my friend. At her family’s insistence, we gathered back at the house in the yard after the Mass and burial. I didn’t speak to a soul, and soon they left me. I went inside and made camp stew for Lydia and we ate it on our laps in the living room, the dining room being too empty and dark.

Lydia had grown much in the last year, and even at twelve years old she had already developed laugh lines at the edges of her eyes. This last year she had learned to take care of the children and to clean and to hoe vegetables. She wore her hair up loosely like a working woman, and her arms had become brown and freckled. She was our daughter and our helper. She dusted, she cooked, she cleaned the young ones, and at slow moments of the day she stood out on the front porch, in full view of the passing menagerie: the men and their ladies strolling past us whispering and hiding their faces behind hats and fans, the silly Mussons up the street who spoke only in French when within our hearing and who gaped at us like we were caged things. She stood up in front of all of them and, hell, she looked
proud,
dauntless, as if daring any one of them to say anything to her. To any of us, for that matter. She flapped her apron out at the yard, flinging the crumbs and dust away and looking as if she were shooing the world off, too. She was tough, boy, and I believe she got that from her mother. She didn’t care what people thought, as her mother hadn’t, at least after a while. I myself have only recently learned to ignore the opinions of others, and now it is too late.

I hate these two words, I loathe them:
Lydia was
. She is in the next room, and we are both coming to the end. I’ve already begun to think of her as someone gone. I prefer to think of the past and not this terrible present. I cannot help my girl. You, whoever is reading this, must understand: I loved all of our children ferociously, but Lydia was special. She had been the first, the first perfect child born to a father so entirely imperfect that he’d forgotten what a sinless being looked like. And there she was, on her mother’s breast, eyes closed lightly, her cheeks pillowed, her nose gently flaring with each soft breath. I will admit that I fell in love with my daughter. She was part of me, like a new limb. Something good. It is all the more horrifying, then, that I spent so many of her years occupied with my business, my reputation, my
own
life, as if I had one separate from hers, while she was living hers here in this house and wondering where her father had gone. And now we are going together, and she is down the hall and does not recognize me anymore.

I have decided that I must give this to Eli. He is the only one who will understand these pages. He has suffered loss at my hand, and now I am doing the same, and also at my own hand. We are bound by that, I suppose. He would have every reason to take these pages and burn them as soon as I am gone, but I think that he won’t. He is a better man than I was long ago, when I would have burned them without hesitation. I shall ask him to take these pages and make them known. The other book, the book of infernal war, will have to be destroyed, of course. They are incompatible now, they do not share the same author. I am a different man. He will have to go see Beauregard. I must send for him now.