A Separate Country (36 page)

“I have a decision to make,” he said, stroking at his beard as if he could yank it off and become someone new. “Or, rather, we have a decision to make.”

The words themselves were enough to make my heart beat in my throat. The confusion in his face nauseated me. Perhaps I had been wrong to think that he had changed.

“Yes?” I sat very straight in my chair. The candles blocked his face at the other end of the table, and so it seemed that his voice came out of the flames.

“I have not been entirely honest with you,” he said.

Another woman
. I was silent, my hands clawed at each other in my lap.

“I am a failed businessman, now twice over.”

I was so relieved, I nearly said,
Well, of course you are, darling!
I thought better of it. “Oh dear,” I said.

“I have failed you and the children, we are on the brink of disaster. I never cared much for the numbers, the money. I was foolish. Soon the insurance company will have paid out all of its capital in claims, which are coming all at once because of the damned epidemic that seems about to break open here in the city. Did you know,” he said, spearing a piece of catfish as if it had personally thwarted him and his plans, “did you know that up and down the river the boat captains have been instructed not to stop in New Orleans for fear of taking aboard the contagion? The cotton docks are nearly empty, same as the molasses sheds. And now the factors and the traders and the importers come to me, their insurer. They have their hands out and demand to be paid so that they might continue to live as if nothing has happened.”

I kept staring into the flame, looking for meaning in this talk of his. I understood what had happened, but what decision was there to be made?

“This is what you do, of course? Pay out money? They are not wrong to ask for it.”

He leaned back in his chair, hands behind his head, looking up at the ceiling where flies and other insects had left their trails. I could see his face, and it had suddenly relaxed.

“I need to clean this ceiling tomorrow,” he said. “It looks as if someone has tried to draw a fresco up there in insect shit.”

I giggled at his profanity. It was a weakness of mine. He looked toward me, searched for my eyes.

“Yes, that is what I am supposed to do. I am supposed to pay out such claims so that rich men may remain so. I do not insure poor men against poverty, only wealthy ones. I do not insure poor men against death, only the ones with the money. On and on.”

“You sound like an old abolitionist all of a sudden,” I said. “What have you against the society men, the people with money?” I had plenty to hold against them, but that was personal. John was talking as if there was something more basic at stake.

“Perhaps I do. In any case, I have been asked to think differently about my job as an insurer, and to consider turning what money is left in the company over to another cause entirely.”

The note from Rintrah. Of course Rintrah would be involved.

“And that would be?” I didn’t care much what he did with the company’s money. If we were to be bankrupt, what did it matter how it happened. Soon I would learn that it mattered quite a lot.

“Father Mike, Rintrah, and several negro men have made plans to evacuate great numbers of coloreds, those who could not afford to escape otherwise, from the city before the epidemic gets much worse. They are sick of watching these people die, Anna Marie. It looks particularly bad this year, and so they think this is the year to secretly move these people out and away from the yellow jack.”

“Secretly?”

“They believe that they would be prevented if whites found out about it.”

“And they need money.”

“All of it.”

I had yet to tell John about the day I watched the family of Paschal’s cousin die in their tiny Treme cottage, how I washed their feet and how Homer had fitted them with shoes. I saw them now. I had never been the same person since, and yet I had not told John. I had kept it to myself. I was possessive of them, those moments standing in that dark room, because I had not been the same woman ever since.

“Where will they take them?”

“To Rintrah’s fish camps, north of the lake.”

“By horseback? Cart?”

“Rintrah’s hearses. No one bothers a hearse, Rintrah says.”

Rintrah’s hearses, Rintrah’s sense of humor.

“So you will give them the money?” I assumed he would, simply because he was having such trouble deciding what to do. The John Bell Hood I had first known would not have hesitated, he would have paid the claims of the insured and let the rest fend for themselves. If he hesitated now, it was because he had changed also, and powerfully enough to overcome a lifetime of subservience to authority. He just needed a little urging. I felt no hesitation, I cared nothing for the money, but if it could keep another father, mother, and daughter from dying alone in a dark cottage foraged by thieves, then I thought there was no question what had to be done. John was shocked.

“Anna Marie, think.” The excitement in his eyes betrayed him.

“Are we too good to be poor?” Had little Anna Marie, daughter of the great jurist Duncan Hennen, flower of a thousand balls, just said such a thing? I had.

“No, we are not too good to be poor. But the children! And if I were to abandon those insurance claims, any hope we would have of finding a place in society again, where a general and his lady ought properly to be, would be ruined. They would bear that grudge against me, who gave away their money to negroes. We would be lost to them.”

Perhaps it was the staring into the candlelight, or perhaps it was simple anger. In any case, I felt the edges of my sight closing in, red spots floating in front of me.

“I give not one damn about those people. Where are they now? Where are they with their money? Do they help us? Do they even come to see us? And what do they do with their money? They build monstrous, half-empty pillared homes while across the city men die, and then when it’s convenient they run their carriages over the unmarked graves on their way out of the city. Dying of the fever is not for them but for the benighted and unlucky. I say to hell with them and their money.”

John stood up, came around the table, and took the seat at my right hand. He stared into my face as if he were watching a new species of insect unfold from its chrysalis. Something dangerous.

“You don’t believe that.”

“I do.”

“These are your friends.”

“No longer. I have none, except for you, and these children, and Rintrah and Father Mike. And had I been thinking correctly, as I am now, I would have still had my friend Paschal, I would not have allowed him to be offered up like a lamb at the sacrifice.”

His face turned stone hard. His sky-blue eyes burned hard, almost becoming gray in the low light. You stumbled in then, Lydia, to show us a clematis bloom as big as a dinner plate, and when you saw us you slowly backed away. Do you remember that?

“I cannot afford the luxury of being so flippant about our responsibilities and future.”

“Flippant? You know as well as I do that I speak the truth.” I had passed some test, some point, and now all I could think about was getting rid of that money, giving it away. It was dirty and it tainted us, even if it wasn’t ours to give away. I could sense the anger in the room and it made me desperate.

“And now, Anna Marie, that I understand your point of view and what you wish for me to do, I believe I need some time to consider the matter alone.”

He stood and went for his coat. It was all I could do to keep from jumping up and wrenching the coat away from him, to keep from dragging him back to the table and tying him there so that he would not leave again. But I had to let him go. If he could not see the truth of what I had said, and if he could not see the true path, the righteous path, that he had been called to take, there wasn’t anything else for us to say, and certainly no future together that needed protecting. The last four days had been nearly perfect, and they would remain so even in distant memory, if it came to that. I watched him thump down the steps of the front porch and unhitch his horse.

Four days later I opened the door to find the giant priest waiting for me. Father Michel. Father Mike. My old, clumsy, strong friend.

“Anna Marie, why is this door locked?”

“Good afternoon to you, Father.”

He pursed his lips and crossed his arms. I must have acted drunk, and he sniffed my breath. He shook his head and gathered himself up like a proper priest. He had come for other business.

“John has sent me for you and the children.”

I now noticed the large four-in-hand in the drive behind the house, captained by a bored seminarian perched up on the box.

“Sent
you
? Why, then? And why you? Has he lost the use of his other leg?”

I hated myself for saying such a thing about the man I loved, but I was not entirely whole at that moment, as I’ve told you before.

“He is engaged in the sick ward and cannot get away at the moment.”

“Bah.”

“And he thought you’d more likely listen to me than to him.”

I do not know when the tears began to slip down my face, and I only became aware of them when Father Mike stepped over and put his arms around me. I buried my face in his cloak, which also smelled of lye, like John himself.

“You must all leave the city. You cannot give birth in this city, Anna Marie, however stubborn you are. Look at your stomach, that balloon! That child could come any moment, and he
must
not come into the world with the fever everywhere. It is very bad this time. Believe this.”

Ah, Michel. So tender and so primitive, a rough sculpture of a man who had never ever become very comfortable with other people and their passions, so afraid of his own. Thank God for the Church. And now he stood in my foyer, no longer the satyr in altar boy’s robes, but a man pleading for my safety, concerned for my health and the health of my children, no leering anger, no bravado, no threat. He dressed modestly now, his clothes loose and threadworn. He had quit cutting his hair long ago, and his beard had become long. He had banished his vanity, the pleasure he had taken in his powerful body, his fists, his cock, his mastery of the brutal side of men. Now he breathed out only a kind of true love, rough and innocent and pure. He had become a priest after all.

It felt as if we were all coming to the end of something that had begun nearly twenty years before in that swamp, when Michel and Rintrah and Paschal and I had come together. Whatever had been set in motion that awful night was coming to its final stage, and either we would pass through and be forgiven, or we would fail and live always in fear and doubt and regret.

“What of the others?” I said, showing Michel to the blue couch. He sat at its edge nervously rubbing his hands, which flaked skin from a dozen calluses.

“What others? Who do you mean? We have no room for others. Your friends will have to fend for themselves, I’m afraid.”

“You know who I mean.”

He knew who I meant, but I think he was surprised that John had talked of them to me, and more so that I cared.

“I do not know what the plans are for them. We shall see. I have come for you and the children, it is imperative that you leave now. The others we can talk about later.”

“I’m not leaving without knowing that they are going also. I want to know those plans you claim you don’t know.”

We had not mentioned their names, who they were.
The coloreds, the negroes, the field niggers, the octoroons.
I sat down in one of the red chairs, newly solid on its legs, and crossed my arms as if I was perfectly willing to stay in that seat forever. Would I have put the children at risk to make my point? No I would not. But I was ready to die myself, and if not for the life growing inside me, I might have done just that. I sat on my seat, immovable and insistent, because I wanted Father Mike to know that I had changed. I wanted everyone to know.

“They are coming with us also,” Father Mike said.

“In hearses?”

“In hearses.”

“Why have we a big carriage to ride out in, then?”

Father Mike rubbed his fingers through his greasy locks, leaving behind what looked like tilled rows of hair, a crop upon his thinning head. He smiled at me out of one corner of his mouth. Sardonic.

“The others will disappear and no one will notice, but you are Anna Marie Hennen Hood, your husband is General John Bell Hood, and you cannot just vanish. You must be seen leaving the city, like the rest of the gentry, or the gentry will become nervous.”

He knew that word,
gentry,
would stab at me, and he smiled the old twinkling altar boy smile, before sobering again. I ignored his insult for the moment.

“And so we go,” I said.

“And so you go.”

“It will never be the same after this. Our lives will change.”

“And this is so bad?” he said, gesturing at the rags he wore, at the unkempt beard. He was calm, nearly happy by my reckoning.

I said nothing for a while. Then I turned around and shouted into the house that you children were all to prepare for vacation. Before going upstairs to oversee the chaos and the fights and the packing, I remembered something and turned around. Father Mike had taken to staring out the window, where a mockingbird plucked at pokeberry fruit.

“Why you?” I asked.

“Hmmm?” He was engrossed.

“Why did he send you?”

“I am his friend,” the giant priest said.

We fled the city before the plague could get worse, and we did it knowing we would return to utter poverty. There he was, sitting on the box with the driver, scanning the terrain and squinting into the distance as if leading us into battle. We spoke very little, but I do not mind saying to you, Lydia, that I was at once overjoyed and apprehensive. I was anxious about what we would become now, and how we would feed you children, but I was confident that we would get through that. I was more apprehensive about the people we would soon meet, with whom we would soon share cabins and food. I was scared of them, of what they thought of people like me. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.