A Separate Country (45 page)

I had admired the way Early and Beauregard had commanded their few troops to bring order to the crowd. So few men, and yet they had commanded as if they had been a division, waiting for precisely the right time. It had been impressive.
It was the only impressive thing.
Down below, the only evidence that there had been any disturbance was a dark streak on the parquet, like a smudge on clean glass.

I said nothing. But now I looked the little man square in the eye. Thirty thousand dollars was a fortune, it would make me a wealthy man, or at least a man who could keep his wife and children in a manner befitting a general and continue the work I had begun with Father Mike. The work would not be hard.

“I would like you to join them. The same terms.”

Here was the offer that had been coming for hours. I had known it. I stared at the little man. There was a knock at the door and the tall Creole let Beauregard and Early into the little room. I stood slowly, and each of the men patiently waited until I had reached my full height before extending their hands.
They still know what honor and dignity is.

“General Beauregard. General Early.” I inclined my head and shook their hands. The two returned the greeting, and as if we had all arrived from our own far-flung command posts to receive orders, we sat down as one, on the edge of our chairs, spines straight, hats upon our left knees.

Mr. Dauphin stood, put his cigar back in his mouth, and put his own hat under his arm.

“Gentlemen, I’m sure you have much to discuss, so I will excuse myself. General Hood, it’s been a pleasure. You are a remarkable man, and you deserve remarkable things. This is a generous city for the smart man, a brutal one for all others. I’m sure you know this. I look forward to our next meeting.”

Before I could say anything, the door had been pushed open by the unseen hand of the tall Creole assistant, and Mr. Dauphin had slipped out into the dark hallway. The three of us surveyed the great hall’s floor, strewn with the lottery’s waste, and remained silent. Early looked distinctly uncomfortable and fiddled with the brim of his hat. Beauregard looked sad. He turned his eyes to me.

“We’ve made a mess of it, haven’t we?”

“What do you mean?”

Beauregard was no longer the expansive, joyous master of ceremonies. He was drawn inward, brooding, but also in no mood for coy games.

“Oh, Hood, for God’s sake. I have to say it, eh? All right: I am broke. So is Early here.”

Early turned to Beauregard in anger, but did not immediately contradict him.

“Bone-dry, Hood, my friend. Without a nickel.”

“I was not broke,” Early said. “Just poor.”

Beauregard nodded his head. “I speak hastily only because we all know why we’ve been gathered here, and I’m eager to make the situation perfectly clear.”

I rubbed my knee and looked past the two men, to the windows far above them. It was blue turning to orange. Sunset.

“I understand,” I said.

“I lost nearly everything for that war. I will not speak for Jubal, he can tell you his own story. But it is not much different. We came back to our country, to our people, and we did not know them and they did not know us. They knew money, and what did we know? How to dig entrenchments? Maneuvering to enfilade? The likely range of a cannon? How to feed ten thousand men maggoty tack and make them like it? That was useful knowledge once, and no more.”

Beauregard began coughing and waved his hand to keep anyone from speaking while he hacked.

“And yet, we were
the generals
. You are one of us too: the proud warriors, the brave and honorable losers. We are an example to these people,” he said, swinging his hand out over the empty hall, “even if we don’t like it, even if we only want to hide. We cannot hide. Which means we cannot be poor.”

“There can be honor in poverty,” I said, surprised he’d said what he’d been thinking, and almost sure for the first time that I believed it. I had reservations.
What do I know about the honor of poverty? I came here to win a fortune.

Beauregard hung his head and shook it. Early stood up and leaned against the rail, watching the negroes sweeping up the mess.

Beauregard measured his words. “There may be honor in poverty for
them
,” he said, again pointing out to the hall. “But what of us? How much humiliation must the Confederacy take? What will they force us to? To the sight of our generals sweeping gutters, or robbing men in the Vieux Carré at night? Is that the price of losing, of all that blood that was shed for, as we might have put it once,
honor
? I do not mind picking cotton. But I do mind a Confederate general picking cotton.”

I understood perfectly. I had thought the same thing before. No longer, but there was a time when it had driven me entirely. Part of what had once made me desperate for money was this, this horror at the idea of failing the Cause by becoming an embarrassment. But I had also wanted the money because I wanted to be comfortable, and I wanted my family comfortable. I wanted status. And I knew Beauregard wanted all of those things too. I just didn’t think that anymore. I wanted money for other things now.

“You want me to join you in the lottery.”

Now Early spoke, Beauregard having exhausted himself. The old Creole soldier patted his forehead with a handkerchief and watched me with dark eyes.

“We want you to consider it, John,” Early said. “I myself have found few ways to make a living for which I am suited. I see no reason that the reputation I built, over many years of fighting and suffering, should not now be the source of my reward. I have worked for it.”

“You worked for the victory, for the nation,” I said, again surprised that this is what he, apparently, believed.

“That is true, and as a result I am left with this reputation that is mine.”

“It is not yours. It belongs to the Confederacy.”

Early’s eyes widened.

“I did not think you were naïve, John. Do you truly believe that? That anything belongs to the Confederacy now?”

“It does not belong to you.”

“I am patronized for it.”

“You have sold it.”

Beauregard sighed, picked up his hat, and stood.

“I told Dauphin it was no use, General Hood, that you would be too vain to put on a show for the crowd. This is what I told him. But what I was thinking, is that you’re too pigheaded to do what is right for you and your family and the rest of us. I may be wrong about that. I hope that I am.”

And Beauregard left.

Early stared after Beauregard. Then he sat down in the chair across from me and closed his eyes, as if he were waiting for something.

He is waiting for me to decide. He thinks I will change my mind.

Was there honor in poverty? Here was an opportunity to provide, and live in comfort, for many years. How could I make this decision for my family? I was a failure. I did not know how I would make a living now. Beauregard was right; he had only one thing to offer anyone, and that was his place in history. He knew that this was the only thing he could sell, the only thing of value he had to sell. It was all anyone wanted from him anymore, and why shouldn’t he give it? To do otherwise would be to live with uncertainty and, yes, perhaps poverty, for the rest of their lives.
I have no lieutenants
.

“You will die in the poorhouse, John,” Early said.

I will die in the poorhouse. And where did all my men die? I have lost count of all the places. In fields, in woods, in creeks, in muddy trenches.

“You will never be offered something like this again,” Early said. “This is it.”

I will never have my leg again, and yet I still walk. I have some blessings still. Those men, my men, they do not even walk now. They are lost.

“You are a prominent man, there is no shame in taking patronage,” Early said.

I was their patron, and they died. I am owed nothing. I owe much.

“John?”

I stood up and faced Early and smiled grimly. I got my cane set, and put my hat on my head.

“Thank you, Jubal, but my answer is no. Will you tell Mr. Dauphin?”

Early nodded his head and seemed relieved.

“I knew you would say that, John,” Early said. “Not everything has changed, thank God. You’re a bloody fool, but you’re our bloody fool.”

Outside, I felt the last warming moments of the sun on my face, before the shadows swallowed the rest of the street. When my carriage lined up for me, I pulled myself in and took time settling in.
This may be one of the last times I get to ride like this. Donkeys after this.

I was elated. My life stretched out ahead of me, dark and perilous, but not yet over.

“To the poorhouse,” I told the driver.

Eli Griffin

B
ut that was not how I remembered it, and sitting there in that kitchen with Rintrah crying over his lost brother the priest, and then later riding out into Terrebonne Parish to do whatever the hell it was I was going to do with Sebastien Lemerle, this is how I remembered that day at the lottery.

New Orleans was a city of crowds. It was not a crowded city, but a city that yanked people along from spectacle to spectacle, into groups that formed and disappeared just like that. Every day the web of spectacles, all them places here and there where you might get to see something special, every day it shifted and wove itself new, so that the tight, straight, and regular city streets only barely intersected the path by which men and women navigated a far more twisted-up maze of beatings, amusement, intrigue, prayer, politics, greed, and charity. Folks formed up around old Creole men arguing the hows and wherefores of a revolt, as if they could; they formed up around drunken
américains
asleep with the pigs; also around a young bride presenting her first child to the world; around the old Creole couple who were torturing their negro servants in violation of the code; around men picking out bawdy tunes on hollowed boxes strung with wire; around the Italian vegetable hawkers; around a young man choked dead in an alley off Dumaine, the dull black bruise of the garrote around his neck as if it had been delicately drawn on his skin, a tattoo. Crowds gathered in cafés to hear the old men of the great families hollering the outrages of a history so distant that no one recognized the names or the places, only the old sounds of pride and loneliness that were the words and the sound of their native tongue.

If the city were its stages, its performing platforms, there existed no bigger stage than the one at Union and St. Charles, just three blocks down from Canal in the
américain
section.

That October, after we’d all been out at the fish camps, the city just weren’t the same. It had been crippled, thousands had died of the fever, so many that it made our work seem insignificant, nothing more than a whole lot of shouting at the Devil, him with his deaf ears. I say that, but them that lived because of those fish camps would tell you a different story, and I should include myself in that number. I was grateful. I wasn’t ruined, and I was alive. Along with the lives, a thousand fortunes had been lost, but new fortunes called out to new makers. Roll, river, roll. Opportunity acalling.

A crowd had been gathered outside the three-story office of the Louisiana State Lottery Company for hours. It was a building carved in scrolls and cherubs and gargoyles. The people wandered in and out of its doors as the mood took, watching the proceedings and then strolling on back out to the street to gossip and to wait some more. Thousands of men and a few women danced along the narrow boards laid on the mud and sand of the banquette, trying not to slip into the muck. Liquor passed from hand to hand. It was cool for October, so their faces were not streaked with sweat and their handkerchiefs were not stained with dirt. But it was hot enough that most of those waiting to hear the results of the drawing shuffled toward the building, where the building’s eave threw down a few inches of shade.

A little man in a tiny black hat every once in a while come and stood in the doorway, peering out at the multitudes of us. He looked both afraid of the fidgety mass, but also real happy about their reason for standing there outside his building.
I have their money in the vault,
I reckon he was thinking. He was a rich man, I knew, and he had made a whole lot of other men rich the last few years, after rescuing the lottery from failure. None of
them
men would be standing in that crowd waiting patient, hoping, praying, for the news that their number had hit. The rich men, the men who owed that little man a lifetime’s worth of favors, knew where the money could be found.
Providence is for the foolish and the dull.
The little man, he was the lottery director.

The little man turned back into the grand foyer, guarded by some hefty stone angels staring blank and dumb down from the fancy carved window arches, and walked quickly up a small set of stairs until he had disappeared. I imagine he peered down upon the entertainment he had dreamed up and gave birth to, an imaginary place in which all the riches of the world were stored up nice and tidy and neat in two large, transparent, and spinning wheels, which I reckon we were supposed to think were magic and not controlled by little men in their secret rooms high above the floor.

I moved through the crowd outside the lottery building without disturbing it.
And why would they notice?
I was invisible because I looked like the rest of the men and was also unknown to them. That had always been one of my talents, getting lost in plain sight. I dissolved into the crowd, I was only a face seen for a moment, a shoulder, a hat. This made me feel powerful, invincible. I was a pair of eyes, ears, a mind. I had no weight on the earth.

I had money in the lottery, knowing I would lose it. I was not stupid. And yet I could not help myself. I couldn’t stay away from a gathering of all them people, I had come to love the grotesque and the ridiculous, the absurd: men milling about watching other men pull numbers out of piles, hoping that somewhere down in there were fortunes with their names on them. Maybe it was the summer, the ridiculous things we’d had to do just to save some lives, what with the hearses and all. It had been a circus, and it would have been funny if it hadn’t been sad and deadly serious. Maybe this had made me cynical. Or maybe it had made me come to enjoy those ridiculous things, like I had become a connoisseur of the ridiculous, the brutal, the sad. I don’t know. No matter, I’ll just say that I loved the dramatic and futile gesture. How could I avoid watching the lottery, then?