A Separate Country (16 page)

John was the first person I painted from life and not memory. At first I kept starting and stopping, finally stabbing my brush at the canvas. He tried to smile, a smile that was slow and agonizing like a great limb cracking. I think he thought I was nervous, and once he stood up and walked toward me, assuring me that this painting wasn’t necessary if he made me uncomfortable. “You needn’t fiddle with nature, Anna Marie, and you shouldn’t worry about insulting me. You couldn’t.”

“Sit down, I can’t paint you like that.” He was standing in front of my easel, scrupulous about not peeking at the canvas, his palms turned up and gently thrust toward me, as if he were giving me something. Permission not to paint him, I suppose. He shrugged and sat back down.

It wasn’t any nervousness that had frustrated me. It was the idea of painting someone living. He moved, his eyes gazed at me as long as he could stand it and then shot downward, his eyelids blinked, his neck flexed, his whole body seemed to vibrate. He was a man, a person, how was I to paint him? He moved. Everything moved on him, if I looked close enough I might have seen the blood running to and fro. I didn’t know how to paint a person in motion. My memories had never moved, they had not thrummed like this.

The painting is outside your bedroom now, Lydia. It’s the one you call
Daddy Under Glass.
I admit that he looks a bit like he’s been trapped, his eyes agog. Somehow I managed to paint those big hands not upturned in offering, as I saw them that day we began, but raised at me as if to push against the canvas from the other side. It’s a kind face, though, and that first night we had met he had said that kindness was rare. Here, I thought, here is kindness in
your
face, John. I wonder if that surprised him. The lips are right, I know that much, and the luxuriant sweep of gray beard, that’s all correct. The way your father’s neck descends into muscle at the shoulder, the vast breadth of his chest, that’s all correct also. Your father said he loved it and insisted I keep it. Mother was amused by it. “You’ve really captured his likeness,” she said, happy and so
very
proud of her
cultured
daughter. She even forgave me for blackening the piece of my ruined baptism dress with the charcoal. When she thought I wasn’t looking she folded it carefully and slipped it into the pocket of her apron. “So glad it is of some good use still,” she said, nearly warbling, stroking my hair. Father admired the brushwork.

It’s a horrible painting, of course, and yet I believe that John loved it and I love it too. It’s the first thing we made together, before we made you children.

I don’t think of that picture when I am near him now, or when I am dreaming of him. I have ten thousand others, a million others, that I memorized during those days of staring into his face, and I was able to sneak those out of the house without Mother knowing. By the end of the sitting, John quit posing and simply watched me, especially my eyes. He watched my eyes and my hands, and once in a while he would touch his nose or his forehead to tell me about my paint smudges. I believe he made his own pictures during those days. This scared me at first, as he himself scared me. He was a man who had seen the unnatural deaths of men at the hands of other men, and had made a profession of it. What could he possibly see in the face of a woman who had spent the war riding horses and taking piano lessons? A few dozen city blocks were the compass of my world. He made me shy and hopeful, he made me want to follow him out into the world, battened down in sea storms and riding horses through the Caucasus, or whatever one would do with a man who had no fear. Of course he had fear, as much as most of us and more than some. Maybe the painting isn’t so wrong after all. Only later did I see that in his face, and also the love and longing. He hadn’t been beaten, it seemed to me, but he
had
been whipped. The thing most people have seen in his eyes is exhaustion. I’d say that was right. He told me he wanted to put down his load. He wanted to sit beside me, he wanted me to sit beside him, and across that parlor and in the center of my world, I saw love and admiration and lust in the eyes. A strong man for whom I was both a mystery and a respite. I didn’t paint
that
of course, but a few weeks later we were engaged to be married. Draw your own conclusions, darling.

The only other thing John said to me about that painting, besides describing his admiration for it—a terrible lie!—was that it made certain things clear to him.

“I must live up to it now,” he said, leaving on the last day of his sitting, when I’d finally turned it around for his inspection. “That is the face of a different man.”

I thought he was insulting the painting, or making a joke. Later, I knew he was talking about himself.
He
would have to become the different man. It was not easy, Lydia, it surely was not. Not for any of us. We assume that when a person sets out to change their life, that person is setting out to change it for the better. I’m not so sure anymore. Or, rather, I’m not sure it’s possible to know how you’ll come out when you start mucking around with your life. And the hard part isn’t the setting off, the hard part isn’t the beginning.

You’re old enough, Lydia, possibly you’ve noticed. We’ve both changed, and the worst of that transformation has only recently come to pass. This is the lie of that painting I made, or at least of the folly of painting it and thinking it would be him, my John, perfectly captured. No one, no one
real,
stays still for very long. Memory stays put, it patiently remains in place while we hang ornaments from it and dress it in finery. But flesh and blood moves, it never stops. Flesh and blood is naked, it is constantly falling and scarring and breaking and getting dirty and picking itself back up. This was true of me no less than of John. I suppose that’s what I should tell you about now.

I pray we are through the worst of it. I am too tired now to think. Your little sister is crying, she wants food.

John Bell Hood

H
ow many times did I carry her off to our rooms? One hundred times for every child? Two hundred times for each of the eleven? It would be a low estimate. I didn’t have relations with Anna Marie so much as I dug into her flesh, merged with the heat and musky sweat of her, became greater than human rather than less so, as I was in the daytime as an incomplete gargoyle bearing forth only shadows where parts of a man had once belonged. She was pale and smooth, and the muscles in her back stood out as twin ropes descending, flexed in her arch upon me, arms behind her head, her knees dug into my sides. I needed only to imagine that curved back, the arch, the stretch of her arms behind her head, the rough nipples on my tongue, the heat and rankness of her, and off we would go upstairs. Nine months later, a child. Or twins.

Ten years of that, of lying on my back immobile, was the vantage from which I watched the years wrench devilry and lust and joy from her face, to be replaced by duty and exhaustion and distraction. And always I was on my back, unable to take charge of her as a whole man might. After the seventh child, we began sleeping in separate bedrooms.

I came home when it suited me. I kept a cot in my offices for those nights when, having spent hours bent over the maps of old battles, I collapsed and slept, dreaming of messengers and the clank of camp spoons. On those maps I arrayed gravel and river stones for the troops, matchsticks for fortifications, golden pen nibs for commanders. I pushed them here and there, wanting to see the battle again, to hear it and smell it. Never broke through, though. Around me I kept the letters from my correspondents spread over the floor and upon the desk, in the chairs. I stalked from one letter to the next, peering down at them and their reports.
We moved into an enfillading position, but lacked support from the front, and thus could not press the advantage as they were able to wheel toward us on their flank without risk….
I barely understood that talk anymore, that language. Why did you not just kill them? That is what I mumbled to myself sometimes, shouting it other times. Your job was to kill, not to save men!

Could I have talked to Anna Marie about my work, my memoirs? I could have, but I would not. She was a woman. More important, I suppose, she was my wife and I did not want my wife to think I was insane.

Nor did I want her to know what I spent my days doing. When I came home in our third year of marriage and told her that I would be closing the cotton business, I led her to believe that I had been cheated of my rightful business by unscrupulous men, that my partners were dullards, and that had I just another six months we would have been rich on the Tennessee cotton I’d recently cornered in the market.

In short, I didn’t want her to suspect the truth. We had failed because I did not bother to lick the boots of the Creole men who controlled the wharf, nor had I stooped to beg business from my former colleagues, the politicians and farmers who still remembered the Gallant Hood. Of course, it was not begging and it was specifically why I had been brought into the firm in the first place. Yes, I had cornered a market in West Tennessee cotton, but only because I was one of the few cotton men unaware that flooding had been worse than usual in the flat country around Memphis, and that the cotton I had purchased was worthless for anything other than the making of nuns’ habits and paupers’ rags. The truth was that my partners had left me in disgust. They were right to do it, though I hated them.

It was months before I admitted that failure. I stayed late every night, tracing my fingers along the meridians of my failures, where the lives of men had ended. In the hallway on one of those nights I could hear the negro housekeepers sweeping and shining and talking.

“The crippled man, he work hard.”

“Not like them fancy men, not like a Creole.”

“Not like a
white
Creole.”

“Not like any Creole, you know it.”

“True, true. Yep.”

“Work like an American. Building things.”

“A cripple building things. Strange days. And he look like he washed up with the Ark.”

“Older than he is.”

“How old is he?”

“Don’t know, just old.”

“Ain’t never take a drink that I seen.”

“Ain’t never seen a woman up in here neither.”

“He got a cot.”

“Too small for two, though.”

I put my maps away for the night and folded up the letters. I went home to Anna Marie, to the unfathomable gabble of children in my house. I had become unspeakably sad as the voices of the negro dust sweepers faded down the hallway. They would have known about the flood. I went home to tell Anna Marie of my failure.

I wasn’t a failure long, praise the White League, that ragged, unseemly collection of bullies and paranoids.

They came to all of us, all the Confederate generals living there in the teeming swamp city: Beauregard, Early, Hooker, Longstreet, and Hood.
Where do you stand?
they asked. By which they meant: You, who spilled blood in the war over these very same matters, what will you do now that the city is occupied again, and the victors rule, and the negroes run for office in their brand-new suits?

We all made our vague promises, our assurances of solidarity, all worth spit. Every one of us was afraid of arousing the anger of the Federals, who might charge us with crimes, possibly treason. Who knew? General Longstreet, though, could not help but engage the question posed by the White League:
What will you do?
I’d been around him since serving in Texas, and I knew him to be a principled cuss likely to martyr himself for the pleasure of it, the pleasure of setting a righteous fire to yourself.

Not long after the White League had approached us, the
Daily City Item
published Longstreet’s letter exhorting the good people of New Orleans and South Louisiana to not merely accept Federal rule and occupation, but to welcome it in the true and proper posture of the vanquished, which is in obedience and servility to the victors who had, after all, proven the superiority of their will and their culture and their cause by mule-whipping us on the field of battle. The rules of war dictated our submission to our conquerors. It was the only honorable position.

Six months later, after his utter shunning, he came to me. His insurance business, the Insurance Association of America, would shortly fail, he said, because of the boycott. I was not surprised, though I acted so. He seemed pleased by this, perversely.

He said, “John, I trust you, and I would like you to take over the insurance business and save it.”

“I couldn’t,” I said, knowing that I could.

“You must, you are not
tainted
as I, and you have that family.”

When he said
tainted,
and declared me clear of any
taint,
I briefly wanted nothing more than to be so tainted. But I agreed to assume the ownership of his business for a nominal charge.

When Longstreet walked out our front door that last time, he turned and said, “I feel light, John, for the first time in many years. Do you know what I mean by that? Do you feel the weight ever? I reckon a general might give up his command, but it’s a whole lot harder to shrug off that cursed weight of it and its history. I’ve been years with it, and now it’s gone. Strange.”

I
did
know that weight. I kept it in my office, on my shelves, with the maps and the letters. I smiled and waved good-bye to the general.

This is what Rintrah said to me when he found out I had launched into the insurance business.

“Don’t fuck up this one, too, General, or you’ll hear from me.”

“Hear from you?” I bit into one of his tangerines and slobbered on his hat. “And what do you mean, ‘this one, too’?”

Rintrah wiped his hat and charged me three cents.

“I know everything, John, and I especially know the failures. I have an ear for it, a touch. I can feel failure wobbling the street and vibrating the banquette. It is a very useful skill, there’s money in failure if you know where to find it. And so of course I know how your cotton business failed,
General
.”