A Separate Country (14 page)

The captain told me there were seventeen miles of levees. Everywhere there were things moving. Sometimes I’d just squint my eyes and all that motion worked itself together into one vibration of a hundred colors. I knew then I was just one man among hundreds of thousands in that city, each hurrying and scheming and stumbling along, none ever straying far from the river, which was the bearer of all things. I was scared for the first time I could remember since the war. I had never been in such a big place.

Packet boats floated by lugging great piles of oranges and green bananas and bales of plantation cotton, all of the colors looking like they was fighting against the brown Mississippi for the notice of us on the shore. Behind me, I heard the belching and smoking cotton press, five stories high and more than a thousand tons, crushing cotton in its jaws like a great captured beast.

Negro stevedores and roughnecks hauled the boats to the dock with thick hawsers in their hands and thrown over their shoulders, their arms and backs straining and shining. Sailors jumped off them same boats and ran into town, after what I didn’t know. Later I knew: to find the last places they remembered being happy.

Clouds of mosquitoes moved together like whining ghosts between the piles of boxes and cotton and vegetables, surrounding those in their path and moving on. All the while the river kept running. Pieces of the country come floating downstream and this place, this swamp with fancy buildings, caught them all.

Then I picked up my bag and moved off, into the interior of the city, down streets crowded by men and women in all kinds of colors. I heard people talking what sounded like nonsense, and then I realized it were words, languages, and there were a dozen of them, and in the air around me all this wild talk twisted and turned on itself until it was one language that sounded like song more than talk. I walked off down Chartres feeling a little scared and also excited to get started, thinking there weren’t a better place in the world to set down. I could see the money, I could
feel
it, at every step. They was just throwing it at folks, maybe even me.

Whatever I had known to exist in my short life, New Orleans had more of it, and plenty more I had never imagined.

That night I got drunk and wandered the riverfront again. The great piles, lurid and fantastic and welcoming, had become dark hulking things in the thin lamplight. The lights across the river, right on the Point, danced from poles and in windows, and sometimes they seemed to detach and float toward me. I realized how high I’d become. I stuttered and stumbled my way toward the edge of the levee, toward the lights.

To my right, farther up the wharf, another light drowned out all others. Fire, great leaping and crackling white and orange fire spitting black smoke out across the river, where it was sucked back into the dark. A barge being salvaged for scrap lumber to build houses had caught fire. Barges covered in cotton dust could erupt in an explosion like that, I had known that, but I’d never seen it. I was mesmerized by the fire, and I was so drunk on the flames that I didn’t at first hear the men closer to the barge shouting,
Man aboard!
And there he was, a tall, muscular, and bald man trying to muster the courage to run through the flame and into the water. Men were shouting at him to dive out, to get out, to run, to get away, but I could see it was all useless advice. The only thing that fella would listen to, the only thing he was paying attention to, was that fire, and it weren’t speaking to him. He would run at the flames, which surrounded him on all sides, and then dart back again. I ran to the edge of the wharf and leaned over the side. The smoke made me feel sick. I shouted, “Don’t be afraid, it can’t hurt you!” Lying. I wasn’t certain I could ever jump through fire, I was afraid of those red licks. But I reckon he believed me, or wanted to believe me: that it wouldn’t hurt, that a stranger up on the wharf would know better than those flames and be worried about him. Nothing else to do. He ran through the flames pushing at him and leaped through the air for the water. The cotton dust on his clothes lit instantly, and I could hear him scream. I prayed for the quick relief of the water. But the man landed on a stray raft of old logs and was knocked in the head. He did not move again, and soon he was consumed by the fire and, obviously, blessedly dead. All of us standing up there watching couldn’t do nothing. Someone sent for a newspaperman, who arrived as the police began to try to fish the man’s body off the raft. They had to cool the body down with water first. The newspaperman began to ask questions, and I fled.

Always a price, and that price always paid by the ass-poor, the simple, the people who weren’t known but by a few and would never be remembered.

The next morning I asked for directions to Hood’s house. I could have gone anywhere, but he was the reason I’d chosen New Orleans. In my excitement, I’d nearly forgot.

I walked uptown and hid behind an oleander bush across the street from his Garden District house. I watched his brood, his slavering, drooling, laughing, hair-pulling clutch of children gallivant under the magnolias in unthinking bliss, chased by their young and beautiful mother. I became more resentful every minute. For hours I stayed there, watching.
The butcher, the murderer, the cold bastard
has children?
He
has a family? If I showed him a picture of my family, would he care now? Now that he had his own? I still doubted it.

Hood finally emerged from the house and climbed awkwardly up onto his horse. I vowed to follow him and end his life. He rode and I ran. I cut through yards and alleys to keep up. Hood made only three stops: at a sawmill where they turned old barges into wood suitable for building, and at a mason’s yard, and then finally at the cleared and slowly transforming site of St. Geneviève’s Chapel, where a young, gigantic, and very tired priest stood before it, hammer in hand. I hid behind a pile of lumber and listened to them speak.

Hood sounded nothing at all like I had expected. He was icy but deferential to the priest, calling him Father. They talked about yellow fever, the work at St. Geneviève’s, but most of all Hood talked about the money he’d just spent paying off the priest’s debts on stone and wood and medical supplies. He told the priest he couldn’t keep paying, that the priest would have to finish sometime soon, whatever his wife wanted. He said this without malice, just a matter of fact. And then Hood said something very strange. He said,
Sometimes I think I will always be a penitent,
and the priest said,
There are never former sins, and they cannot be paid for. Penitence is its own reward,
and then he turned his back on Hood as if he were nothing. Hood merely nodded his head and walked toward his wagon. I thought to myself
, Penitence may be its own reward, but the sins gone get you, Hood.
I was the body of that sin, its arm, and that arm carried a knife.

It was becoming dark, and I slipped through the back gate of the cemetery. The hinges squeaked, and I looked back and could see the huge priest silhouetted in the late afternoon sun against the horizon, turned toward me and scanning the long shadows. I was better than him, though, I could move without being seen, I was a cat. By the time I got around the block and into the intersection, Hood had only just mounted his horse and begun to clop back toward that mansion Uptown. It was not much at all to spook that old horse, nor to pull Hood down off it and out of the intersection, behind a wall. I’d brought a sack for my head, eyes cut out, the word
Broker
across my forehead. He struggled to his feet and I kicked him down again. He never called out, he only tried desperately to see what was behind the holes in my mask, to see my eyes. I kept moving, didn’t want him to think that something human had ended his life, but something unfathomable and elemental and straight from Hell, where I would drag his soul. That’s what I wanted him to think.
Why didn’t he call out?
He finally just sat there, in the dirt and mud, his horse standing off and watching us close. He looked ready for something, and then I knew it was me, and I raised the knife and it flashed, and before I could bring it down I had a premonition.

I saw the body, and the man on fire, and the blood running in the mud after the battle in Franklin, and how I had slipped in it as a boy, and how I had picked my way among the frozen dead arrested in their worst moments of agony. I saw my soul float off, never to be captured again. He bared that bearded neck of his, and God as my witness my knife came within an inch of the pulsing sinew. I’d have done it, and I could have done it, but I did not do it.

All I can say is that it’s a whole lot easier to imagine a man’s death—the torture before it, the final reciting of the man’s sin, the blood and pain, the dimming of the light, the quiet afterward—than to do it your own self with your own hands, the man in front of you panting and snuffling and so fleshy and heavy and real. I seen the dead, I seen a whole lot of the dead. Hood had fixed it so I would never quit seeing the dead, and not just the frozen on that battlefield, piled atop each other, but also the face of my sister dead in her bed. I had been a boy, I played in the creek and in the fields, trapping rabbits and catching grasshoppers and making cat’s cradles out of honeysuckle vine. And then
he
came. It was not innocence I had lost. Lost that later. What I lost was any expectation of good and right, any faith that I could know those things anymore. I lost my
innocence
when I realized that I was not alone in thinking that, and that there weren’t anyone with any sense who
expected
beauty, or worse, sought it. Beauty was accidental and fleeting, and even if you were on the lookout and caught it at the right moment, that beautiful thing would break your heart no doubt, and all you’d have to show for it was ashes.

Revenge, revenge was one of those beautiful things I had imagined, perhaps the last beautiful thing I kept locked down tight in the deep cells of my mind. But when I stood over Hood, and I could have made that circle closed and taken that revenge, all it looked like to me was a crippled man rolling around in the mud. Could have been anyone. And what’s more, once I’d finished him, the thing that would have been left would have been a corpse, a pile of death, the ugliest thing.

I fled. The last I saw of him that day, he was still sitting on his ass, his head cocked backward, throat turned to the dark orange sun.

They would be after me, I knew that much. Someone would hunt me. I wondered if I could get back on a boat. I ran through neighborhoods and black faces stared out at me from candle-yellowed windows. It became full dark. I turned and turned and then there were no houses, and in front of me lay trees and the sweet smell of peat and the sound of tree frogs, and I ran toward it.

I went into the swamp. I skirted the lights of the maroons, the swamp men long ago escaped from captivity and mingled with the Indians. I became lost, permanently lost. I thought I would die there, and finally I sat down between the knobby knees of an old cypress and resolved to get it over with. I watched the water ripple and roil at my feet where something ate something else quietly and efficiently. I fell asleep and I dreamed hard things.

Asleep, I had pinned my hand on a small, sharp cypress knee. When I woke at first it seemed there was no one around. But then there was an old man sitting against another cypress a dozen feet away, looking at me.

“You had a dream, boy. What you doing here?”

“Don’t touch me.”

“Ain’t gone to. But you ain’t right, boy.”

His skin glowed white in the starlight, a dusty white.

“I’m fine. Got to get out of here. You stay away.”

“Son, I watched you dream, and you fighting the Devil, which mean you got something to hate, no? You tell Houdou John, Houdou John knows what he talk about.”

I knew no one in that swamp or in that city. I didn’t trust the man, and I shook my head.

“Suit yourself.”

Houdou John gave me some water from a flask, and we spent the next few minutes looking around us. I noticed some odd-shaped orchids hanging from the branches above, like stars. From the water just two hummocks over, I could see a twisting, amorphous cloud of black lift up from the water and drift together between the trees toward us. Houdou John stood up and brushed off his canvas pants, and I did the same. I could hear the cloud before I could see it clearly: mosquitoes. All around us clouds emerged from the water. The sound seemed to come from deep within my ears, the whining and droning that cuts straight into the brain. Houdou John looked nervous. He picked up a bag of roots and began to march off away from the clouds.

“Follow me, boy, that is, you want to get out of here.”

“How far is it?”

“To St. Gen’s? Maybe a quarter mile. You lucky the General ain’t there no more.”

“And the big priest?”

“He the one sent me for you.”

We made one stop. I heard a moaning like wind between houses, only this were
real
moaning. It came from out behind a big white building that Houdou John called the convent. There was sadness and pain in those moans, and also loneliness. The sound got to my ear long before we come upon the source. I wished, later, that he’d never have taken me that way.

“This is the plague’s home,” John said, as if that explained anything at all. Out of his pocket he handed me a rag to cover my mouth. We passed through the gates of the convent, below the arms of a large cross.

“We gone to see this last thing before we go back to the chapel where Father Mike waiting on you. You a dumb boy, you need some learning you gone to keep from dying. I myself got what I need right here.” He padded his burlap satchel slung across his shoulders, and I saw the knife protruding.
Guess I’m gone to do what you say, old man. Guess I could be dead right now
. Then I caught sight of the plague’s home and forgot about him and anyone else.

Nuns tended to the afflicted, who raised up a ruckus of coughs and hacks and shouts and moans that were like an evil choir. We must have been taking too long at the entrance, because soon there was a man behind shouting for us to get out of the way. We split on either side of the path and watched a slope-shouldered bald man and his young, stout-armed, and glassy-eyed partner carry in two people who looked like skeletons already. They drooled out their mouths and looked at us without blinking, and I started to jump forward to wipe their chins when Houdou John stopped me.