A Separate Country (39 page)

“Who’s that, son?”

“A girl I know. She comes around every so often. No one, really.”

“Hmm. And then there she is, carved up and sitting in your lap, after you worked on her two days.”

“You been watching.”

“I see everything.” He laughed.

We sat there, whittling and watching the sun ripple through the ranks of cypress and poplar and cottonwood, orange bending to red as the fiery globe disappeared.

“We haven’t lost anyone, have we, Lieutenant?”

“No, we ain’t. Not a one.”

“That’s good. That’s exactly right. It’s very different.”

“Yes sir?”

“To be sitting in camp and not hearing men moan and cry. It’s very peaceful.”

“Not so much noise.”

“Not so much pain, is what I meant.”

If I ever thought I’d confront him about the battle at Franklin, the deaths and the pain he had caused that day, that was the time. I’m sure I could have made him apologize, made him apologize to me personally, right at that moment. But by then I’d lost any interest in hearing such things out of his mouth, I didn’t need it anymore. That sun, that camp, those blankets, that bearded man carved up in only his suit and not a stitch of rank anywhere, that was some kind of apology I reckon.

“Now go take evening muster.”

“Right now?” I was feeling mighty peaceful there with my good thoughts and my belief that all had been made right, finally. I felt calm for once.

“Right the hell right now, Lieutenant. Mount up.”

“Ain’t much of a mount.”

“You can walk.”

“Reckon Lightning will do fine.”

I was up and about to ride out when Hood called out.

“You forgot the girl.”

The carving was standing up on my seat next to Hood, watching me. He took it in his hand and carried it over. I took it and stuffed it in my sock.

“Any girl who comes around every so often ain’t nobody, hear?”

I nodded and rode off into the trees, ducking limbs and spiderwebs. When we were out of sight, I moved M. from my sock to my breast pocket and buttoned it tight.

Anna Marie Hood

T
here is freedom in poverty, I discovered, and the first freedom I indulged was the freedom to feel pain and helplessness and not have to try to explain it, either to myself or anyone else. Explanation was not necessary.

But pain goes numb, and in God we are not entirely helpless, so these feelings, though they never went away, receded.

I was also free to watch you children with the eye of a naturalist. I saw you grow, establish territory, flaunt your talents. I was free to hope that you would escape us one day, escape our poverty. I hoped that when you did you would not despise us.

With my freedom, I did one good thing that seems worth writing down. I went to see Eli Griffin’s girl. He never told us her name. I don’t think he was ashamed of her, I think he wanted to save her from us and our prying eyes. Smart boy. But I found out who she was anyway, her whole name and the story of her family, and how she lived the first twenty-five years of her life, none of which I plan to relate here. I will respect Eli’s desire to protect her, so I will call her M. I never told Eli this, he wouldn’t have believed me if I told him I was not offended by her profession and found her delightful. I was afraid that if I told him,
Don’t let her go
,
she is a fine woman,
he would have run away. He was a contrary boy too.

I had much to say and had run out of people to listen. I had so little to give except what you’ve read here, Lydia: the long, strange life of my marriage, which I cherished as my last possession, the only thing that could not be taken away or claimed as payment of a debt. I was still in debt, though, possibly to God. I prayed, I went to Mass. I prayed to be told what I could do now, when I could barely do for you, my children.

During those prayers, Eli appeared to me. My mind kept coming back to him and the mystery of his life, especially when I prayed the rosary. It must have been Mary, the Blessed Virgin, who called him up to my mind, and Mary who caused me to weep at the thought that Eli would not find anything, or anyone, to care about. He was Paschal also, he was an orphan too. It came to me in a rush. There was a second chance for me.

I found Margaret a month ago. She was cleaning Eli’s little apartment above Levi’s factory. I had walked the two miles from our house, and when I knocked at the door I expect she saw a disheveled beggar. She opened the door wide, her face wary but placid, and without saying anything she seated me at a small table near the window, drew some water from a pitcher, and served it to me in a tin coffee cup.

“Mrs. Hood.”

“You know who I am?”

“Eli has described you, and I seen you from time to time about in the Quarter. You used to drive in carriages, I ain’t mistaken.”

“No more carriages for us.”

“That’s what I heard.”

She could not have looked more Irish. She had the freckles, the hazel eyes, the light brown hair that streaked red in the sunlight. She had the Irish way of looking suspicious and ready to hear anything, all at the same time.

“Eli has told you our circumstances.”

“Yes, he has. I am sorry about your money. But you done good, you done a Christian thing with that money of yours, and ain’t no one with sense gone to fault you for that. Not me.”

“Thank you.”

“Why are you here? Have you come to see Eli? He ain’t here, he’s in the card houses.”

My business was with her, not Eli.

“Do you love him?”

She scowled. “I ain’t thought about it, and it’s no business of yours, no matter who or what you are.”

“That’s true. I just wanted to make sure someone cared about him.”

She walked to the pitcher and poured herself some water. She sat back down across from me.

“We talking as women? Not fancy lady and poor Irish whore?”

“Yes.”

“I care about Eli Griffin, more than I care about anything else. I don’t always know what
he
cares about, but I care about him. Yeah, I reckon I love him, too, though I ain’t at all sure what good that’s gone to do him or me. He’s getting hisself lost in this town, he may know cards and grifting, but he’s as innocent as a lamb. Naïve, sure as I sit here.”

He was not the first man I knew who had been described as naïve about the city. I’d married the first one.

“Does he love you?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“I believe he does.”

“Then you’d be a smarter lady than me.”

“Don’t let him get lost. You know what I mean. Lost in this city. Don’t let it happen.”

“Got no way to stop it.”

“You can. You’ll know how when the time comes. Help him then, don’t leave him be.”

“You a seer? Because I don’t reckon you could know the future otherwise.”

I drank from my cup and tasted the tin. It made the water crisp to the taste. Outside the wharf gangs shouted and unloaded. I finished the water and decided I’d better go. I’d said what I’d come to say.

“He loves your General Hood, that’s certain,” M. said, so softly I thought she might be talking to herself. “Hated him once, now he loves him. He’d die for him now. Strange how it all comes out.”

I slid my chair around the table so that I was sitting next to M.

“Don’t talk about dying.” She’d begun to cry silently. Her head drooped a little, and only her shoulders shook.

“Got it on my mind, Mrs. Hood. But you don’t want to know that. You came to visit with Eli’s whore, tell her what to do and how to live.”

“No, that’s not why I came.”

Her face had turned red, and her eyes shot open.

“Then why did you come?”

I knew the answer to that question, I’d been rehearsing it during the entire walk down the river to the apartment. I’d been thinking about it since Mr. Plessy described for me the last days of my friend Paschal Girard, the other orphan.

“I came to save Eli.”

“From what?”

“From being abandoned. I suppose I’ve failed, but at least I said it. Now I’ll go, thank you for the water.” I pushed my chair back to the opposite end of the table and walked to the door. M. held her head in her hands.

“You walked all the way down here just to say that?” she called without looking up.

“Yes. I don’t have much else to do anymore.”

She stood up and smoothed her dress in front of her. It was a more modest dress than I had expected. She looked ready to chase children and tend chickens.

“It was good of you, ma’am.”

“Please call me Anna Marie.”

She nodded her head and, reaching behind me, unbolted the door.

“I don’t know what you mean for me to do, but I reckon I’ll do it.”

She paused to hear what she had just said. I smiled.

“That may be the most beautiful thing I’ve heard said in a long time,” I said.

The sun was setting when I walked back to the house. I walked along the river and listened to the slap and crumple of the waves against the bows of the riverboats headed upstream. Across the river, in the wilderness of Algiers, some houses poked through the trees. Men on the quay stood back as I passed. I was content with all of it, even the mosquitoes that landed on my arms and on my neck, soon covering me with red welts. I didn’t brush them off, I let them go about their business. They were God’s creation, too, after all.

When I came in the house, John was in his library crumpling paper and swearing. You, Lydia, were telling the other children bedtime stories you’d invented about gnomes and lions and peanut vendors. I went into the library after kissing you all good night.

“John.”

“You’re back. You look parched.” He was scratching at a piece of paper. At his elbow lay a growing pile of sheets covered in his tight letters, and at his feet a bigger pile of crumpled paper mounded against his legs like windblown sand.

“I think you shouldn’t give that book to Beauregard to read.”

“It’s too late, I’ve already done it.”

“Not the war book.”

“Then I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“The other book, the one you’re writing right this second.” I stamped my foot and pointed. I felt giddy, like a child. He slipped the paper to the top of the pile and then tried to move the pile into a drawer as if I couldn’t see him. “That book, John.”

“It’s not a book.”

“I think you should give it to Eli to read when you’re done, and let him work to get it published.”

“Why would I do that? Assuming, for the moment, that the book you’re talking about exists.”

“I think he’s the only person who would care enough to do it.”

“Well, it’s moot, because it can’t ever be published. And what does Eli know of publishing?”

“Probably nothing, but he can figure it out. Why can’t it be published?”

“There are problems with it.”

“Have Eli solve them.”

His eyes drifted to the window, where the mockingbird was fledging her two babies. She was unusually quiet.

“You’ve read it, have you, Anna Marie?”

“No. And I don’t intend to read it.”

“How do you know, then, that Eli would want to help me with it?”

I removed the sun hat I’d been wearing since the morning, pulled two pins from my hair, causing it to fall down my back. My head felt cool again, and I knew John liked to see my hair come down. He sat up straighter. I thought of M.

“I think he would do anything you asked him to do, and I believe he could use something to do. Something important.”

“I’ll consider it.”

I walked out of the room. “Consider joining your wife, also.”

I heard him scraping to his feet and coming after me. “Already considered.”

A week later I became ill.

Eli Griffin

R
intrah came by the factory a week after our meeting in his jungle paradise.

“How’s the ice?”

“Still cold.”

“Right.”

He climbed up on Hood’s seat—I had come to think of it that way—and pulled out a pipe.

“Ain’t supposed to light up in here. Chemicals.”

“Well, can I chew on it at least? Or has
Monsieur Rouart
banned that too?”

“No, I think you can chew on it.”

“Thank you.”

He worried the pipe from one side of his mouth to the other, staring at the files of icy pipes, white ghosts receding into the depths of the building.

“I loved her, you know.”

When a man says that to you, you know to keep your wise mouth shut.

Rintrah said he had loved two beings in all his life. The first was the colored man Paschal, who I only know of because I’ve read about him here in these pages. He was the man who ended up in the attic under his care. They were brothers, or at least Rintrah considered them such. They were not brothers, no one knew where either of them had come from. They had been babies on a doorstep. They had lived in the orphanage together, tended by colored sisters, growing up side by side. Life afterward had knocked Rintrah up one side and down the other, but still he felt protective of the man, his
brother
. The man Paschal.

The second love was for Anna Marie Hennen, and in that he was not entirely crazy. It was not crazy, once, to have thought that Anna Marie Hennen might love a dwarf. She was that sort of woman, he said. But instead, she had married a crippled general. “I hated him. I don’t no more, but I hated him. And I hated that she’d prefer a gimp to me, a killer to her loyal and loving Rintrah. When that wedding went off, I reckoned I was going to have to fend for myself. That was the beginning of my career, if you can call it that. But I didn’t stay mad and hateful. I came to like Hood well enough, and even to respect him. But I couldn’t never see the two of them together, it just ripped me up.”

He went silent for a while. “And now it’s all falling apart,” he said, after a long time. “We’re all falling apart. I’m the only one left.”

I knew nearly nothing about Rintrah, and so I didn’t know what he meant. His face cracked, his mouth slid into a wide slit, the mouth of a man trying not to cry. His light blue eyes welled up. He spit fiercely onto the ground in front of him and recovered himself a little. We sat there for two more hours. I went and got Rintrah a coat from Mr. Rouart’s office, and when Mr. Rouart came to fetch it and suggested that Rintrah leave, Rintrah swore at him and Mr. Rouart walked back to his office. He was angry but he left us alone.