A Separate Country (30 page)

I took the correct turn, straight toward the convent, and then I knew I was being followed. Women in black glided past cisterns and under dark galleries. They knew what I had done. They closed in, sweeping toward me, faces white and featureless.

Then I was at the convent door, shouting
Sister Mary, Sister Mary.
I could hear the sound of my pounding echoing down the stone hallway. I waited for the ghosts to set upon me, but Sister Mary Thérèse opened the door before they could pull me back.

“I killed Paschal.”

“Surely not,” she said. She stood before me in work habit, brown homespun and bare feet. The hem was wet as if she had been cleaning something.

“He was there at that ball because I told him to go there.”

“You invited him.”

She took me by the arm and marched me into the chapel out of the hearing of the others. I had surprised her, and she was not used to surprises. She knew me, she had thought, but now? The back pew was rough-hewn and different from the others, full of gouges and sharp edges, and I could see where distracted nuns had scratched crosses and crude cats and bleeding hearts lightly into the wood.

“Yes.”

“To cause trouble.”

“Yes, but not real trouble.”

“You get to choose? You play with your friend like he’s something you bought on the street, and then you think that you can choose what happens when you abandon him?”

“I never abandoned him.”

“You abandoned him like he was just another nigger to you. This is the house of the Lord, child, do not blaspheme with your lies.”

“It’s more complicated than lies.”

I thought she didn’t understand my point. But she pressed on. Her face cracked and split as if to release something terrible within, terrible for her. Anger, violent thoughts.

“You stupid girl, you are no mystery.” She shook. Her pale brown hands gripped the pew until they’d turned white. “And you know little about the man Paschal, this man who haunts you, the man you called friend, the man you used as a pawn in your silly little games. Oh, I know why you invited him, do you think Paschal does not talk to his old mother Mary Thérèse? Hmm. In the end, you cast him off and confess your guilt. I suppose you want absolution? I cannot give it.
You
know nothing. You don’t even know the person to whom you’re confessing.”

Just as quickly as she’d spit that out, she recovered herself. Her face gathered together again and became unreadable. She put her hands in her lap and lowered her head, mouthing words. When she looked up again she reached over to hold my hand.

“Why?” She sincerely wanted to know.

How could I tell her that, late at night, I felt the horror and shame of not knowing my man entirely, not understanding him completely. I had married a man who had led an army. I was horrified that he had killed, that he had likely whored, that he was both the bearer of news from the outside and its cautionary tale, broken and brooding. What kind of man ordered other men to their deaths? I imagined he strode through the underworld like a prince when the light went down and he was out of the sight of proper folk. Where else could such a man find a home, who had ridden over bloody roads and watched the deaths of boys and old men? I believed this was the reason I had been snubbed, removed from guest lists all over the city, looked on with pity.
Fine,
I had thought
, but you all aren’t without your little shames either
. And so I had set out to remind my cousin of her own shame, just in case she had forgotten.

This is how I thought of my dear friend: a shameful dalliance, something to be ashamed of, an embarrassment. I had changed. I had become a horror to myself.

How to tell a nun this? I coughed out something and she seemed to understand. She twisted her hands in her lap and got to her feet. I wanted to ask her what she meant, but she was gone. She walked down to one of the front pews and knelt, genuflecting in long, sweeping movements from her head to her chest to each shoulder. She entered a pew and knelt, her hands clasped before her, elbows on the pew in front. I don’t know why I stayed, nor why I, too, got to my knees and prayed to the Holy Mother. There were moths in the air above the tabernacle, drifting up toward the window in which Christ reassured His mother and Mary before leaving them again.
He was always leaving,
I thought
, and no one thought to comfort those two who had always waited for Him.
I watched the back of Sister Mary Thérèse’s head, and I could see she was praying furiously, working her rosary and pausing now and then to talk directly without the beads.

I was staring at the Resurrection window when the old mother superior appeared again at the end of my pew.

“There is someone you should meet. I will get her. You’ve come for information about Paschal. Don’t ask her anything, she won’t answer. But you should meet her.”

It felt like those moths orbiting the head of the Magdalene had temporarily taken residence in my stomach. I read that somewhere in some jungle or bush the natives believed that the place where a child first stirs is a place that marks the child’s character and destiny. A new understanding of the life I’d chosen, bound in its old and hard-spun chrysalis, first stirred in the back of an old convent chapel while nuns brushed quietly by down long stone hallways. I hope that means something.

It was the red-faced nun who had brought me to the Requiem Mass. She stood over me and then sat down at the very end of the pew and did not speak. She only looked at me, and then to the candle at the altar still lit from the Mass. She looked afraid it might snuff out, or more likely, that I would snuff it out. She was tall and green-eyed, and only by looking closely could I tell that she was much older than I’d first thought.

“Who are you?” I said.

She only shook her head.

“Why did you bring me in here earlier? Why did you let me in at all?”

She stared wildly at me, as if she were trying to get me to do something. Her eyes never left my face. I looked at her hands, long, elegant, and supple fingers on calloused palms. Farther up her wrists I studied long, thin, faded old scars. I looked up in her face and it was Paschal who looked back at me. Paschal’s face, his nose and eyes, his laugh lines, his sad mouth.

When she saw that I understood, she stood and left me alone again.

John was not happy that night, one of his rare appearances for supper. I suspect he came to supper only to confront me. How did he know the spectacle I’d made at the café, or what I’d said? I didn’t ask. On my way home the streets had filled with gawkers staring at the crying woman walking straight and without sound. I passed them without looking, but I noticed the boys running between the bananas and the fan palms, off on errands I couldn’t guess. I suppose some might have carried the news of my disintegration to John, no doubt scratching at a ledger with his pencil or lounging in the winter of the ice makers. Or they might have merely offered news to the network of clubmen and potbellied traders who, I knew, would pass the word along without fail until it was known by all. I bought shrimp from an Italian woman and she smiled sadly at me when she handed over the tightly wrapped packet of soggy, fishy newspaper. A woman could not have a secret, so why bother to hide tears, or anger, or a slight wobble in the step? I’d have as much luck hiding a goiter. That’s what her smile said.

Mother, who had been looking after the children during one of her brief sojourns back into the city, boiled the shrimp for supper. The house on Third Street seemed older than it had three weeks before. The two great bay windows on the second floor like eyes in a pale red face, a white gallery at the front like a yawning mouth. Sitting with my husband for supper
was no longer
new. The flatware was not new, the china was not new, the crystal not new, especially not the old glass I insisted remain at my place, carried over from my parents’ house. The mosaics of yellow candlelight upon salmon walls, so light and trembling, reminded me of the butterflies my father and I used to collect a lifetime before. Here I was the wife and the mother. Out there, across Canal Street and among the Creoles, the mud was deep and I was always who I had been.

I don’t know exactly how, but your father could eat anything without getting a speck of it in his beard. His sad blue eyes always stared down at the table at something a few feet in front of him, usually the salt dish, and with that beard his entire aspect at table was that of a daydreaming, fastidious Moses. He had once been a great talker, and more romantic than I had imagined, but his eyes never lifted from that point in front of him on the table. I wondered if there was something beyond that point, something beyond the table and the floor and the earth that he could see, something that he wouldn’t let go. When he was silent for days, I was convinced of this. On those days he seemed to make his own weather. No candlelight could illuminate his face, nor dance upon the walls. This was untrue, of course, but it’s what seemed to be true.

That night, when he finally looked up from the tarnished salt dish and points beyond, he said I had most offended him by implying that he was a murderer, a vengeful man.

“I do not seek out men for revenge, I do not kill because my wife, or anyone else, tells me to.”

Oh, such cant!
I thought.
You don’t do it
now
, now that I need you.

“
I know,” I lied.

“This man, this Sebastien Lemerle, as I’ve heard he is called, he will not like these threats. And as you and I both know, he is a dangerous man.”

I watched him speak, the gray and the black of his beard moving back and forth as he spit the words out, and I could tell that fear did not bother him in the least. He was lying.

“Surely you’re not afraid of him. I am not.”

He brought his good fist down on the table, making the candles jump and gutter.

“Do you think,” he snarled, “that we are the only two in this city? That you are the only one I am responsible to protect? That we are the only two he might wish to harm?”

I had no earthly idea who he was talking about. His eyes drifted off again. He seethed. I thought he might weep.

“Just keep your mouth shut about Sebastien Lemerle. I do not want my name and his uttered in the same breath. Ever, by anyone.”

“Don’t talk to me like that, John.”

His head drooped and his shoulders hunched.

“It’s important,” he said. “Just remember that it’s important.”

In the long hours after supper John sat out on the front gallery sipping an old cognac, one of several his old friends from the army had sent him after our wedding. They were squat little bottles that he lined up in two small rows upon the sideboard. They were each different, but he drank them in turn, on down each row as if one was the same as the next and it was his duty to treat them without favor. Had I not spied him through the porch window nodding gratefully at the passing menagerie on Third Street, holding a glass and cigar in one hand and propping his bad leg on the rail, I might have fallen out of love with him that night.

John Bell Hood

M
y days became alike. I left the house, I went to the attic, I stood vigil, I wiped Paschal’s head and neck with a wet cloth, I fed him tepid soups and watched him swallow unconsciously. I looked for signs of life, waking life. I quit going to the office entirely. I left word of where I could be reached, and occasionally Alcée rang the door and left papers for me to sign before scurrying off under Father Mike’s glare. They were invariably papers authorizing the payment of claims, and I signed them all without inspection. I did not care to argue with anyone with a claim against me, even though I knew the money wouldn’t last. I was involved in more important things, I thought.

Sometimes Paschal moved, and at first I would limp out of the attic and down the stairs to summon Rintrah or Father Mike, who trudged dutifully up the stairs behind me, leaving the first of the season’s sick lying on their cots, rigid like cordwood in the throes of their fever. I hardly noticed them, only the smell, which was sour and peaty. Each time they followed me into the attic and watched for a few minutes as Paschal twitched and then lay still, and then they’d leave me alone again. I came to learn that the body is not entirely ours, and sometimes it does as it pleases without our knowledge. Paschal never woke up, but I stayed there, watching the silhouettes of the windows meander around the room from morning to night.

Father Mike argued with me.

“I don’t understand why you come,” he said to me after three weeks. We stood out back of Rintrah’s house, in the overgrown courtyard. Untended banana trees browned and crumpled at the edges, and the orange trees gave up tiny, mean little fruit. The house was enormous, and from our vantage point I could tell that the sick ward was not its only function. Across the courtyard from us I could see the shadows of men walking by windows, carrying great, heavy boxes here and there. I could hear the faint sound of glass clinking. Someone kept shouting profanities, and every few minutes I could hear the sound of a horse cart pulling up on the other side of the house, out of my sight. Father Mike said Rintrah had won the house in a card game when I asked how an orphaned fruit vendor could find himself in possession of such a house. He didn’t bother to gild his lie, he seemed tired. I decided the men in the other part of the house carried the explanation, but I didn’t much care. I didn’t care for anything but that attic.

“I come because I’m supposed to come, that’s the best I can explain it, Father,” I said.

“I think you are not right, you’re touched in the head,” he said.

“You and Anna Marie,” I said.

He looked quick and hard at me, and then looked up at the roofs, a brief smile on his face, like he was remembering something.

“She is not a stupid woman,” he said. “You should not worry her.”

He removed his boots and let his big yellow-tipped feet dry out in the sun and unbuttoned his shirt to his waist. He was unselfconscious about himself, like a dog.