A Separate Country

For New Orleans
full of sorrow,
full of grace

Notes of Eli Griffin, August 1879

I
woke sick to the sound of an envelope slid under my door. Outside the cotton presses clunked and smoked, the roustabouts shouted oaths at the screwmen, the river slipped past silent and heavy with mud and men and their craft. I listened for the footsteps of the messenger but heard none. They’d begun to burn the sugar down by the molasses sheds, where the Creoles I’d bested at faro the night before would now be standing overseeing the sugar niggers, nursing their own illnesses of indulgence, and finding themselves unable to do anything but mutter
oui, oui
and call for more coffee. San Domingue rum is a hell of a thing, I should say. Oh Lord, my head. I wondered if M., lying next to me, could hear the bones in my head creaking when I breathed. The sound in my head was loud, like the sound of two ships scraping by each other at the quay. It must have made sound. Or maybe that squeaking was me. Quite possible.

Though I lived near the docks, I was not myself a dock man. I was an iceman. I worked in the ice factory and therefore I was suspect, an outsider, someone very odd. I spent my days in the cold, in rooms with no smells and little light. The little factory was an alien thing to New Orleans, the opposite of hot. We icemen were very possibly magicians or devils and I liked the reputation, and I very much enjoyed my job. Good for early morning pains too. I considered going to work and taking an extra shift just to lean against the frozen condenser coils and think of snow angels.

I shook my head to clear it, and immediately regretted moving at all. I became nauseous. I sat down at the small table under the window and inhaled the air pouring through the cracks. When I’d got my bearings, I took stock of the situation.

Had I won at faro last night? Really and truly? That’s what I remembered, but that didn’t mean nothing. I remembered being an innocent boy once, but that wasn’t possible. Couldn’t have been. In my bed slept M., my twiggy Irish girl, my sole companion for many months standing. If she was still selling time to grunting cigar chompers in the plush house on Royal Street, it was only because I couldn’t keep money very long. We didn’t talk about her work, though she still called me her caller.
The one who never pays and who owes me,
she’d say. Not never pay, I guess, but there’s no use arguing with M. For instance, this particular morning. If I had won at faro the night before, there was no longer any sign of the victory. M. had my cash now, and most of my little bed, and still when she woke she would call me her caller. She sucked at her bony freckled knuckle while she slept. I tried not to wake her when I went to get the envelope under the door, but the floor creaked and she stirred, cursing me sweetly in a language I’d never heard. I cursed her right back and crossed the bare, dust-mortared floorboards to the envelope, which was brown and sealed with black wax.

“What is it, hon?” M. called from her pillow, suddenly friendly, probably thinking it was money. She prayed every evening that she would be saved from that fancy house on Royal Street, and so every unexpected thing came to her first as a possible sign of deliverance. Always disappointment, always expectation. I opened the envelope at the wax, using the long middle fingernail I cultivated for desperate fights in saloons. I sharpened it like a knife twice a week.

“It’s a letter.”

“Oh Christ.”

“What do you care? You can’t read.”

“Such a nice boy, you are. The girl swoons, boyo.”

“Not in the bed, there’s a bucket in the corner.”

She swung her feet to the floor. Her feet were tiny, perfect, and her ankles had freckles. Everything had freckles.

“I’m leaving.”

“Kiss me for luck.”

“You don’t got no more coin for that.”

“Don’t ever work anyway.”

A striking, pretty, bony little thing was my M. She stood up to my chin and could look at me so that I would be afraid. She was delicate, nearly no flesh on her except for the sweet turn of her bare ass and the muscles in her shoulders. I looked on her, naked and smirking, and I felt real fondness. Love? Heavens. Great fondness? Sure. She covered up quick, stomped around picking up pieces of her ensemble here and there until she was dressed and ready to march on. She could dress instantly when it suited her. I assumed this was a professional, cultivated skill. She stopped beside me before walking through the door. Her eyes, flecked and hazel, turned down sadly, either from the paint or the wear or both. She carried a small black purse in her hand, which she pointed at me like a pistol.

“What do I care?” she said quietly. “I care for lots of things, things I ain’t ever told you these months I been to your bed. But someday, if you’re very good and God sees fit to save me, I will tell you, we’ll talk a long time, you’ll be sick of my talk. Now I’ll only say this.” She reached up and stroked my jaw, rubbing at the stubble before pinching my ear.

“I’ll say this. What do
you
care about, boyo?”

I didn’t answer quick enough and she gave a little whoop.

“Nothing! That’s it? You care for nothing? Ah, the world is so black, how do you ever stand it?”

She laughed and tippietoed down the back stairway, chuckling to the ground. I walked back to the table to consider the thing that was not money but had been slipped under my door. I also, and I will admit this here now that I know how things turn out, I also prayed real quick that she would get back to her fancy house safely, and that she would be protected. See, there were things I weren’t going to tell her either. Ha. As if I didn’t care for nothing.

I recognized the letter immediately. In the cold wax lay the seal of General John Bell Hood, formerly U.S. Army and Confederate Army, currently a ghost haunting the uptown provinces, New Orleans. Not truly a ghost, I don’t believe in that mess, don’t believe in the spirits and goblins that I’m told parade through this city in their nightclothes and masks and all manner of costume. What I mean is, the man now lived at the edge of everything, cast out from his old habitats, which included the ice factory where he had once liked to nap and harass me in the cold dark. Before his wife’s funeral the month before when I had seen Anna Marie laid in the ground at Lafayette Cemetery, I hadn’t seen Hood in almost a year. Since the epidemic. I had assumed he’d died or fled, but later I was corrected by one of the high collars down at the cotton exchange where I wagered money on the afternoon’s Shell Road races. “Not dead, young ice wrangler, just mad,” he’d said, slipping my money into his vest pocket.

Since insanity was about as remarkable as water in the city, I had given up hope for Hood and the rest of the family. It was sad but inevitable. Hell,
I
was half crazy and well on my way to full-bore lunacy. That is an overstatement. I was eccentric, and becoming more so. I didn’t know what I could do for Hood. And I suppose I was afraid. I am a sinner, I am the man who walks right round the wounded man on the road to the Temple. I never went out to the house on Third Street to see for myself, see. Went right round it, so to speak, until I heard of Anna Marie’s death from a nun who had been teaching me the catechism.

I was becoming a Catholic—there’s something I care about, M.! Pasture and horseshit and all that waiting for rain, all the country in my blood had been bled from me, and the poor-ass country boy I’d been had begun to disappear with it. And I had learned, as the sister had taught me, that death had power, that death must be witnessed. Unlike insanity, which is best left to itself in my opinion. Don’t know what the Church has to say about that though. Ought to check.

Eli Griffin
Top Floor
Levi Fabrics and Rooming
August 17, 1879

Forgive me my neglect, Eli. It has been a very strange year and now we are dying.

I quietly folded the letter and replaced it in its envelope before going on. I put it in the dead center of my eating table, out of the sun that spattered the room through my wood blinds. I got dressed. It seemed disrespectful to be reading such a thing without clothes. Black homespun trousers, blue cotton shirt, longshoreman’s boots. Simple.

I saw you at Anna Marie’s funeral, so first please accept my gratitude. There were very few of our friends there, and I appreciated your gesture. I may call you a friend?

I read the rest of the letter and when I had finished, I folded it into my shirt pocket. I rooted around for my adventuring bag before finding it under some muddy clothes. I checked the contents: a fork, a pigsticker, a Bowie knife, rope, an extra shirt, dried salted beef, bandages, the key to the ice factory, a pencil, a small sack of field peas, a crucifix I’d found in a garbage pile on the levee. Then I walked out the door for the journey uptown.

I do not tell you this, that Lydia and I are stricken also, to elicit sympathy, only to make clear the urgency of matters at hand. I have no time for Creole time, so to speak. You are a Tennessean, despite appearances. (I have heard of your visits to the cathedral.) You are not yet so much a Creole that you can’t occasionally move quickly. I ask that you move quickly.

You hated sympathy, old man, but I still had some for you. I stepped out of the way of a dray splashing colored and oily water up and over the cypress-paneled banks of the streetside ditch. I walked fast, knocking shoulders and not looking back. Decatur Street was full up with carts and drays carrying rice and cane back and forth. Sometimes a hearse, too, sometimes a wagon full of Sicilians settled in among their tomatoes and okra and turnips. Too many people in my way, so I turned down toward the river and the more open spaces of the wharf and the sugar sheds.

Even there I had to push my way upriver toward Hood. Here were the pale German street boys sliding through the crowd of sugarmen outside the Broker’s Charm, handing out samples of sugar in tiny brown envelopes, drumming up business for the men at the top of the Bonded Warehouse, who owned the thousands of hogsheads piled up on the quay. The nervous men with money. I took some sugar and continued through the crowd and into the straight rows of molasses sheds, where the negroes boiled cane and sucked on pickled, salted onions. I ran down those straight alleys until I was beyond the black smoke and bittersweet air of the sugar district and could breathe proper again.

I passed the statue of Henry Clay, where the mumbling old soldiers lived their days upon the great circular pedestal. At Canal I turned up toward St. Charles, past Touro Row where the man at the piano shop ragged a tune without much interest, and past Cluver’s Drugs where I stopped for a bottle of headache spirit. Women dressed in billowing curtains of black from bonnet to hem drifted up the boulevard like loose puffs of coal smoke from the great clacking double-stacked riverboats that crowded at the foot of the street.

Smells washed up on my nose and drew back like waves: shrimp shells, old sweet potatoes, new-cut stone, wet cotton. Water ran down the cypress street gutters though the sun was high. A crop of lightning rods reached up across the city from nearly every building, black against the blue sky. I navigated by the church steeples, and steered toward St. Patrick’s.

Before I am utterly out of my mind, I must make a request of you, I must ask you to settle a very delicate matter for me. I am certain you long ago thought me mad, and that was insolent. Now I forgive your insolence, and admit that though I wasn’t mad, I must have seemed so. I forgive everything, and only hope you will forgive me also.

At St. Patrick’s the Irish were seeing off another of their dead, a full-time occupation for the city’s tunnelers, diggers, chippers, carvers, and trenchers.

“Drowned, crushed, or fevered?” I asked as I passed.

“Crushed,
then
fevered,” said a little man in a big black suit, inhaling his pipe and mumbling an Our Father through the smoke.

The old General wanted forgiveness? My forgiveness? His army had come to my town, and afterward I was orphaned and raised by saloonkeepers, gamblers, and madams in every brokeass river city down the river from Memphis to Natchez. Not once had he said,
My, Eli Griffin, you have made something of yourself despite all!
I had, of course. My girl M. might have suspected there was nothing I cared about, but there was in fact something I cared about right much: I cared about Eli Griffin, marooned boy, hustler, grifter, now a maker of ice. I vowed years before while hauling piss buckets down brothel stairs that Eli Griffin would get his share and hold on to it and not give a damn, and I had done it. I was not playing the jug for pennies down on Jackson Square.

The General might have had his own grudges, I ain’t saying he didn’t have reason.

I call on you because you tried to kill me once, and now that I am in fact dying, I believe it is time to settle accounts in that matter. Which means, of course, you owe me for sparing you the pain of revenge and the shackles of the Calaboose.